Pink Grapefruit and Lemon
This is the fifth of the ten pairs of objects series, half way through now.
I just got hold of a couple of 100% cotton tea towels the other day, one with blue and one with red stripes. This seemed like a good opportunity to use one of them, and being a fan of complimentary colours I used the blue stripe version to go with the pinkish orange of the grapefruit.
I was particularly looking for 100% cotton because I think natural fabrics give the nicest effect in a painting, they reflect light in a more natural way than synthetic fabrics, which often have a kind of sheen to them which I don't like so much. I've had serious problems with lemons and white cloth in a painting before, my second attempt was equally dodgy, so this was another test to see if the way I'm working now would allow me to get a more faithful rendering of those two things. I have to say I think it did.
The method here was the same as for the previous four of this series: Working sight-size, drawing out first with warm glazes of burnt sienna and ultramarine, opaque paint for areas with light falling on them, warm glazes with some colour dragged into them for shadows. The one difference today is that I didn't use my little framer to set the composition.
As usual though, I'm working sight size, today standing about four feet back from the set up. I was much more careful about the drawing out in this painting, after the forms went a little awry in the plum and pear. I spent well over an hour this time, making sure I had everything pretty much in the right place.
As with the plum and pear, this isn't a tonal drawing out. All I'm doing is putting in the shadows. The grapefruit would have been darker on it's left side if this was a complete tonal study, because it's local colour, the orange/pink, has a tone of it's own. But that tone will take care of itself when the colour of the part of the grapefruit in light goes in, and I want that to be clean and opaque, so I don't want a glaze there.
Today was another early start. As we get further through the Summer, direct sunlight comes into the window earlier every day it seems, so I started setting up about 8:00 AM and started laying down the glazes for the shadows about 9:00. This painting took slightly longer than the last one, a little over four hours. I think this was largely because I spent longer on the drawing out.
From here things progressed as normal. First the main colour for the grapefruit went in, using the colour checker in the usual manner. This was another of those times when I felt unable to catch the luminosity of the colour I saw. I used cadmium red to mix the pink/orange colour of the areas of the grapefruit in full light, alizarin just wasn't doing it. Despite that, I couldn't quite get it. Although it works fine in the finished painting, I'm left wondering what else I could have done to increase the luminosity of the colour. The only thing I can think of is to overlay glazes loaded with a pure orange when the paint is dry. I may try it, but I wont have the subject in front of me when I do it so I'm a bit reluctant to mess with a painting which I think is already working. Sometimes you really need to know when to leave well alone. A better idea may be to try a few experiments with the technique first before I mess with it on a real live painting.
One of the things I'm most happy about in this painting is the cloth, it lives much more than any white cloth I've previously painted, and yet took very little work. When it came to laying it in I already had the grapefruit and the lemon living pretty well, all I had to do was make sure I didn't ruin the painting (a distinct possibility when I'm holding the brushes.) Thankfully, as soon as the lightest parts of the cloth had been laid in by dragging some flake white over the toned ground, I could see it was going to work fine. In fact I did very little beyond that, apart from laying in the blue stripes. Building up a painting this way, with the shadows glazed in over the grey ground, means that something relatively simple like a white cloth presents no real problems, only the highlights need to be added. The shadows were left almost completely as they were.
But I have a confession to make. When it came to the shadows on the cloth, I didn't try to paint exactly what I saw today. I'd put in the shadows cast by the grapefruit and the lemon fairly warm to start with, using a higher percentage of burnt sienna than ultramarine. Although towards the end of the painting I could see that these shadows were cooler than I'd got them in the painting, I left them as they were, warmer that they were in reality. It was just that they were working fine as they were, and were giving the painting a nice, warm glow. I didn't want to lose that even though it was a mistake, an accident if you will. If it aint broke don't fix it. But this is the first time I've left something that my eyes were telling me was wrong, and that I could have easily fixed. I left it for the good of the painting.
This has got me thinking. Although my overriding concern has always been, and will continue to be, to paint what I see as faithfully as I can, I'm aware that there are some things in nature which simply can't be matched with paint. A painting is a form of artifice, an illusion of reality. In this case that particular part of the illusion wasn't hurting the feeling of the reality of the cloth or of the fruit, in fact it seemed to intensify the light, so I left it. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that yet.
What I do know is that I'm happy with how this painting came out, with how they're all coming out lately. Previously, when a painting came out with some feeling of the light, like I think the Carrots and Squash had back in November, (at least in comparison to the other paintings I did at the time,) it seemed to be as much accident as anything else. I had a lot of times when I felt I wasn't getting anywhere, when I'd follow up what I though was a decent piece of work with some that I was much less happy with. But for all the paintings of current series, I can see a consistency now which wasn't there before.
It would be worrying if that didn't happen sooner or later of course, but all the same it surprises me. I'm a little wary of allowing myself to believe that I'm getting better, it feels almost as if I'm tempting fate. But I do think that I can see some improvement now, especially lately. However, nothing kills progress like complacency, so I'll continue to work to improve, to try to get a more convincing feeling of light because that's my main concern.
I know there's still a long way to go yet, but I think that now I'm going to allow myself at least some sense of achievement at the small amount of progress I've made. What progress I can see is entirely down to, and proportional to, the amount of practice I do. More practice = better paintings, a tune my regular visitor will be used to hearing me sing. But it's nice to have that conviction vindicated, even in a small way, at this point in my journey. If anything, I've been practicing less lately, I'm acutely aware of how little drawing I'm doing at the moment. Life has got kind of complicated recently, and I've been giving in to stress and a certain amount of melancholy. I plan to make an effort to stop that from getting in my way for the rest of the month, I'll see how I've done at the beginning of July, because it isn't going to go away any time soon.
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