Cilantro Spice

I often saw the traditional spices featured in other works of art but not the spices used in cultural dishes of the tropics and decided to fill that gap with my own answer artistically. This small work series is part of the tropical buffet series and features island spice containers painted in the Plastic Space abstraction style. I always sketch the idea out in graphite to get the abstraction and balance right before I paint. Sometimes these sketches stay in my sketch book for a while like two weeks to a month before I actually begin work in oils. When I am ready to paint, I transfer the sketch to the canvas and add the oil colors. These small works are challenging and take a lot of concentration to complete and can be work intensive. I purposely add mask parts within the composition as a bow to the ancestors for creative skills.