Still Life with bowl and lemon
7th November 2006
Oil on Panel 7" X 5"
I very much liked the yin-yang effect of the two halves of the lemon in this set up, so it was a bit disappointing that I found it to be such a struggle. But as so often happens when a painting degenerates into a fight between me and the paint and I come off worse, some good did come of it which made itself felt in the following paintings.
People like to think that paintings just flow fully formed off the end of the brush of the artist, that art is a gift from above for which the painter is simply the conduit, with little more to worry about than the angle at which he (or she) wears his (or her) beret and how best to trim his (or her) beard. Well, I'm here to tell you that's just not the case. Firstly, women artists rarely have beards, and secondly, for a painting to work, it has to be carefully worked out and built up in an organised fashion from a solid foundation.
That didn't happen with this one. It started well enough. I began as I intended by starting to lay in my main tonal blocks, like the good Mr. Harold Speed recommends in his elementary tone exercise. First the background went in, all appeared fine. Then I roughed in the bowl, still ok. Onto the Lemon half in the bowl. Hmmm, interesting lemon half, nice reflected light off the bowl on the bottom. I'll just put in a little bit more tone to make it work nicer. Oooh, nice, just a bit more. Just a bit more adjustment on the bowl. Lets see if I can get the highlight to work. Yep, pretty nice. Just a few little highlights on the flesh of the lemon. Ok, on to the other half of the lemon. At that point I realised my mistake. I started to lay in the tone blocks of the bottom lemon half, and quickly realised that the surrounding tones were too light. I related the tone of the skin of the lemon to the highlight, down a step from white, and it turned out to be the same tone as the surface of the cloth it was sitting on. Not good, it disappeared completely. The tone of the cloth was most definitely darker than the light plane of the lemon, so there was only one thing for it, I had to repaint the background.
Now that would have been fine, except for two rather important points. Firstly, everything in a painting relates to everything else. Change one thing, and like as not it will have a domino effect and a whole bunch of other bits will need to be changed too. That was certainly the case here. Once I'd darkened the cloth, the bowl and lemon half at the top were much too light, relatively speaking, and had lost their weight. It just looked wrong.
Secondly, I've been deliberately painting the background first lately, as recommended by Mr. Speed. The advantage of this is that you can let the background slightly overlap the objects with a nice flat surface, so that when you come to paint the objects with thicker paint, they seem to stand out in front of it with a greater feeling of reality. The brush strokes in the background can flow behind the objects too, helping this feeling of three dimensionality. Since I'd all but finished the bowl and the top lemon half, I had to repaint the background up to edge, leaving a bit of a ridge where they met. I don't like that effect, it flattens the painting.
So, with around an hour of useable daylight left, I had to repaint pretty much the whole thing. What subtlety and immediacy I had in the bowl, the lemon half and the background had to be sacrificed for a re-working of the tones. These studies are about tone first and foremost, so I couldn't very well sweep it under the carpet once I'd realised it was wrong.
The tones still aren't right, relatively speaking. I really should have had the balls to scrape the bowl and lemon off entirely and start again, but I went for the mimsy tweaking approach instead, which never works. But, as I said earlier, some good did come out of this mistake. It reminded me of how important it is to get the foundation right first before proceeding to detail, so I put together a more deliberate process for the next few paintings of the series. Rather than bang on about it here, I'll refer you to the next painting, the coffee pot and conkers, which I did, for my money, a much better job of.