Peaches & Small Jug

This is the first painting of these handmade bricks and a Davenport Jug.  We were given the jug and quite a few other Davenport pieces of pottery  from a family collection and their role in still life compositions is invaluable.  The knife is a gilder’s knife with an unusual, sloping blade. I have tried but I must confess I have not mastered gilding,  but have found an excellent craftsperson who has.  For the painting? The facets and pattern are  fascination needing minutely different colours and values of light and dark to create the sense of 3D.    It was quite a surprise when I realised the handle is decorated with green scales of a snake and its head is that bump – you can just make it out with the magnifier!  As so often happens when one thing is a labour – painting the peaches with their furry bloom, went just like that.  It is rather a dear little painting and has a very appropriate home.

Oil on canvas  2014  50 x 45cm   20  x 18in

Another story goes with this painting.  The purpose was two-fold.  First to paint something, in this case the cloth, that would be as vivid a red as paint on canvas can possibly be.  The second is to paint something that is white, but how do you do that when the lightest colour of paint you have is white?  What other colours do you use?  This whole bowl cannot be all white if it is to look like a three dimensional object.   Darker paint is needed to show it is turning toward a darker background.  But what colours are needed so that they all look part of something that is glazed and white?  The piece of red silk was something I had bought from the ‘cupboard’ on my last day at St Martins School of Art many years ago.  I still have it, soft and brilliant, folded up in an old (vintage) laundry hamper made of willow that  creaks when the lid is lifted.  The bowl, is in fact a sauceboat with the saucer attached and was given to me as a leaving present by a good friend at Angel Academy – Rusudana Gointi – a terrific artist.  I still have that too, on a shelf among coffee pots, tea pots, glasses and odds and ends.  But this is where its real life was – and in Rusudana’s painting of it.  After six years I realised I could finally part with the painting and it is with another friend – up the road and around a few corners – in her house it looks very at home.  

Oil on canvas  2013  85 x 65cm   33 x 26in 

Another story goes with this painting.  The purpose was two-fold.  First to paint something, in this case the cloth, that would be as vivid a red as paint on canvas can possibly be.  The second is to paint something that is white, but how do you do that when the lightest colour of paint you have is white?  What other colours do you use?  This whole bowl cannot be all white if it is to look like a three dimensional object.   Darker paint is needed to show it is turning toward a darker background.  But what colours are needed so that they all look part of something that is glazed and white?  The piece of red silk was something I had bought from the ‘cupboard’ on my last day at St Martins School of Art many years ago.  I still have it, soft and brilliant, folded up in an old (vintage) laundry hamper made of willow that  creaks when the lid is lifted.  The bowl, is in fact a sauceboat with the saucer attached and was given to me as a leaving present by a good friend at Angel Academy – Rusudana Gointi – a terrific artist.  I still have that too, on a shelf among coffee pots, tea pots, glasses and odds and ends.  But this is where its real life was – and in Rusudana’s painting of it.  After six years I realised I could finally part with the painting and it is with another friend – up the road and around a few corners – in her house it looks very at home.  

Oil on canvas   2013  85 x 65cm   33 x 26in 

A metal tankard and a brass plate, flowers, shiny fabric, a half peeled orange, they are all challenges that I wanted to meld into a subtle coloured still life.  In fact the orange was not part of it all to begin but as I worked on the first stages of the painting it was evident that a higher chroma focal point was necessary.  Higher chroma?  Orange is a high chroma colour – it is a vivid colour.  Most colours can be low chroma – subdued, low value – darker, high chroma – vivid, high value – paler.  The different textures found in citrus fruit are very absorbing to paint.  This is the kind of thing that I find fascinating along with pretty much every other aspect of painting.  Working for many hours on a canvas draws one in to another world where the folds and bends of fabric take on their own landscape in fact they become a landscape, as do the other elements.  The Poppy emerges from the darkness casting its own shadow which becomes part of the whole.  The writing on the Tankard is clearly there, but unreadable – make of it what you will.  I hope the family who bought this work at the Winter Art and Antiques Fair at Olympia several years ago are enjoying the rich gorgeousness of this piece?

Oil on linen   2015   67 x 57cm    26 x 22in