Tuesday, 13-Sep-11 08:23:00 CEST

The revenge on the pears

Earlier in the season 2010 – 2011 we had a theme evening of pears on a glass plate at Aquarelmere. On that original theme evening I tried to paint too much, too many fruits and I also tried to paint the shadows from two light sources. Many times less is more but I have these occasions when I think I can paint anything no matter how difficult it is.

So I had a nagging feeling that I had not achieved enough with the pears on a glass plate. At Aquarelmere we also have evenings without a theme, theme free evenings. So it happened that I came completely unprepared to such evening and then Lucy had brought pears and a glass plate as a motive for a still life.

This was good moment to get revenge on the earlier pears still life.

One thing I like with this series of three paintings is that I have not been messing around with the paint. It is crisp and transparent and direct. Sometimes I call this nonchalant painting. It is harder than you think to achieve this. One main ingredient to this is to work fast, really fast. To be able to do that you need to plan the layers of the painting before you start; and when you are going just go with the momentum.

In the first painting you can see three pears. The background is indigo. My tube of Winsor & Newton indigo is leaving little white spots on my Langton 300 gr paper, I like that. This painting is a little cold in the tone. The pears are bluish and the reflection in the glass is even bluer.  I have done that to enforce the feeling of glass. The idea is that when light goes through glass you get a similar effect to it as with atmospheric perspective, at least that is how I was thinking about it. On this painting we are near to the pears. This feeling of being close is also getting some help of the composition; that the reflection of the pears is clipped.

On the next painting the composition is such that no object is clipped. We are further away. There is plenty of space around the objects. The background is brown. This gives a warmer feeling to the painting. I tried to make the reflection bluish but maybe a little to artificial compared to the warmer pears.

The final painting has a lot more warmer colors in the background and foreground. On this painting the light comes from the right. You can see that the background from right to left is getting darker and darker and also the pears have the light to the right. The combination of light on the pears as well as the background makes it more logical. The reflection of the pears in the glass is clearly bluish, there is no misunderstanding possible. And the pears themselves have a nice green with a bit of brown as you can find on pears so also that makes this painting more logical than the other two paintings.

But still... Maybe the first painting was the best?