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

Marmalade in the Sun

One of my favorite things to eat for breakfast is marmalade on toast, so we absolutely always have it in the house. The other day the sun shone in through the window and hit the back of my marmalade jar giving the whole jar this sunny glow. I immediately wanted to see if I could capture that glow. So the next sunny day I got to work.

I spent a really long time mixing the colours for this. I wanted to get them exactly right.
You may have noticed from my other paintings that my colours end up being quite vibrant. This is not necessarily a deliberate thing; I'm not looking to produce a really bright, colourful painting but I have a bit of an obsession with not producing 'mud', so I guess that's the way they turn out.
My brush strokes are not as loose as I'd like them to be but I'm working on it.

I'm very proud of this painting. Definitely my favourite so far. I'm not putting this one up for sale just yet as I'm thinking about entering it for a local show, or using it as reference for another painting.
I may sell it at a later date.

(6 x 6 inches)
15 x 15cm
Oil on Gessobord

UPDATE: I will be selling this painting on 'Daily Paintworks' soon. Stay posted.