Finding The Colour of Light in a Still Life

Plum in Mexican Bowl
5 x 7 Oil on Panel
sold


This little Mexican bowl with it's thin strip of intense blue is such a beautiful little thing. It sits on a table right beside my easel holding holding pebbles. In this little painting I was trying to do two things, work swiftly and create exciting and lively brushstrokes and to capture colour more intuitively. I've been working on this with my studies for some time now. Sometimes when you look at light in your still life set up the colours seem to shift right before your eyes, one moment they might appear orangey and the next more pink. When that happens it causes a lot of head scratching, peering, and squinting. The trick seems to be to look fairly quickly and paint the first impressions of a colour. It seems easier to capture the elusive colour of light with a quick look versus a long analytical look which is invariably when the second guessing starts. Art, strangely yet wonderfully perplexing.