Still Life #3

This one is even better. Good clear shapes, recognizable objects and lots of colour. Something I learned at the Charles Reid Workshop. Fresh moist paint and lots of paint on the brush.

Still Life #1

I have recently returned from a Charles Reid Workshop, at which I learned a bunch of very important things about how I paint and how I should paint.

I am attempting in a series of small and (I hope) daily paintings to apply those things that I have learned and show some improvement.

Here is the first.

Still Life with Three Oranges

This is the first of, or a study for, a possible series of still life paintings featuring oranges. I usually think more intuitively about colour; just using combinations which I like but after finishing this one it occured to me that it might fall into one of a number of classic colour schemes. Doing a little research I discovered that I had used a version of the "split complimentary" scheme. What this means is that instead of using two colours opposite each other on the colour wheel (in this case orange and blue), you use one colour and two colours on each side of its compliment. Without really thinking about it or planning (again, just because I happen to like these colours) I used orange (obviously for the oranges) and then violet (or purple, even though technically I think there is a subtle difference between the two) and Prussian Blue with is slightly to the green side of blue.

Even though as I say I didn't plan it out this way I did consciously use the blue-green toward the end as a contrast to the violet.

The painting is 9.5 x 12'' and available for $15o. Let me know.