Sunlit Brunch

Following on from my earlier small painting Marmalade in the Sun, I wanted to try to capture the sunlight hitting this jar of marmalade again, so I decided to try it as part of a larger still life.
Full sunlight doesn't actually start making it's way through this window until around midday, so I didn't feel I could call this 'breakfast'. Although I like the cool simple labelling on the French Bonne Maman jars, I played around around a lot with the composition and finally settled on this one, so the label can only just be seen. As I was fiddling with the composition I noticed the light shining through the jar and casting this red/orange glow onto the knife, so I thought I'd see if I could capture that.
Half way through painting this, I decided to change some of the details; the objects were originally sitting on a white and blue striped teatowel but I soon realised that the pattern was fighting with the shadows cast from the window so I decided to scrape the painting back and re-paint it without the teatowel. I'm happy I did that. The painting works so much better. Very often, less is more.

When I'm painting I nearly always listen to some podcast or other. One of the shows I listen to regularly is 'The Savvy Painter' and I have listened to Duane Keiser's interview maybe 6 or 7 times to date.
I like to listen to these podcasts a number of times, because I find I nearly pick up some new nugget of information each time. In this case I was interested to hear Duane talk about how he 'aggresses' through a painting. In other words he attacks a problem full-on until he solves it. This might mean scraping a painting back a number of times until he has solved the problem. I loved that and thought it was very inspirational. It's easy to get too precious about a painting you are working on and not want to make changes, but if you can improve on some aspect of it, you should.
I like alla prima oil painting for this reason. I've learned that I really do prefer to pretty much complete a painting in one session, save maybe a few details I might notice with fresh eyes the next day. I like the paint to stay really wet and creamy so that if you need to make changes, you can without having to paint over a texture that has already dried.


(10 x 10 inches)
25.4 x 25.4 cm
Oil on Gessobord