Auction: Lemons, Bay Leaves and Chinese Bowl

Oil on Panel 7 x 5 inches

This painting is on an acid-free hardboard panel.

I've combined a few favourite subjects here to make an arrangement in which I've tried to create a gentleness and hopefully harmony too, of colour and shape.

There are deliberate echoes of curves, something I've been doing ever since I did a couple of years of composition practice based on Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas. I was more deliberate about them here, and made some subtle changes to the actual shapes of the subject as I worked through this painting.

Hopefully the shape repetitions are not obvious, but hopefully also they are felt, nonetheless.

There was also a subtlety to the colours, especially the main colour of the bowl, the background and the cloth, that I found very hard to capture well.

Those colours are such low chroma, so close to grey, that even the Munsell book wasn't sufficient to help me catch them. In the end, it took a lot of readjustment with scumbles to get close - and a lot of squinting!

Conventional wisdom says that compositions should feature strong contrasts of light and dark, should be powerful. I do paint like that sometimes.

But I often find myself drawn to much quieter and more subtle values that I think must reflect something about my temperament. I suspect that my gentler paintings may have more of me in them 🙂

Starting bid is $150

Payment is by PayPal - (although you can pay through PayPal with a credit card without having to set up an account, if you don’t have one).

How to bid

Just click the "bid here" link above and enter your name, email (this will be kept private) and the amount you want to bid.

The auction uses proxy bidding, which means you can set a Maximum Bid, and until that's reached, you're protected from being outbid. So if Bidder A places a Maximum Bid of $200 and Bidder B comes along to try and outbid A, A will be protected till B outbids A over $200.

You’ll be notified of any other bids and whether you’ve won the auction by email automatically. If you win the auction, I’ll send you an email with a link to pay by PayPal.

PLEASE NOTE: As the auction comes to a close, you’ll need to refresh the page to see the latest bids. It may look as if you’ve won when the countdown finishes, but you’ll only see the most recent bids if you refresh the page, so there may have been more bids that you’re not seeing!

Shipping

International shipping is by UK Royal Mail International (tracked) and can take a few days to get to you. I'll let you know by email as soon as I send the painting, and give you the tracking number. I’ll need to allow some time for the painting to dry thoroughly before I send it to you. Usually, two to four weeks.

Returns:

If for any reason reason you’re not happy with your painting, you can return it to me within 14 days for a full refund. Buyer pays return shipping.

If payment isn’t made within three days of purchase, the painting will be offered to the next highest bidder or re-auctioned.