Still Life, Tomatoes

Shades of Red, 6x8 Oil on Canvas/Panel Sold

The tomatoes are lush and plentiful this year and ripening madly in shades of greens, green-orange, orange, orange-red and deep rich reds. Unlike the perfect round specimens from the store homegrown tomatoes are alive with flavour and lumpy with character. Their colour and shape with it's lumps and bumps are just meant to be painted.

Still Life in Reds and Greens - Oil Painting

Red Green
Oil/Canvas
8 x 10

I'm still painting tomatoes and am trying to get my last licks in while there are still a few ripening tomatoes left to paint. I'm down to a remaining few and will soon have to resort to store bought specimens which can't hope to compare for shape, variety of sizes, colour, personality, but most of all - taste and smell.

Many, many thanks to the hundreds of art lovers that showed up on Oct. 5 for the opening night of the Alberta Oil Painter's annual fall exhibition. Nine artists put up their best works for a total of over 100 paintings. The gallery was hung salon style and was lush with colour and a variety of subject matter. I love seeing all those personalities represented in paint.

Love Apples in Black - New Oil Painting

Love Apples in Black
24 x 18
Oil on Canvas

Autumn, it’s a mellow golden time of year with ripening fields and an abundance of garden produce to pick. The vegetables are covered with sheets each night to protect them from early frosts and there is an abundance of tomatoes ripening faster than we can eat them. As always I’m lured to the greens, reds and oranges of tomatoes. I love the sharp, green smell of the vines and hate to wash it off. I do, and paint the tomatoes with the smell and taste of summer in my mind.

Love Apples in Black combines that wonderful, golden, autumn light with ripening tomatoes in a Korean jug which I've painted before, a heavy, chunky piece of pottery with a glossy rich black glaze. I think this is a Korean medicine jug but I'm not certain. This painting is larger than my usual paintings at 24 x 18. The tomatoes were ripening while I painted them and over a few days some of them turned from green to orange. A fun challenge to capture the original colour.