Lemons and Bay

I’ve been looking at a lot of Northern Renaissance still life painting recently. I’ve had Dutch still life paintings drifting through my mind. Somehow, they must have seeped into me a little and I’ve become quite preoccupied with a handful of images.

This, I guess, is what happens when some of that gets filtered through the way I usually work.

More realised, I suppose, more finished, but still there are areas where the form has dissolved. Those areas are perhaps a little less obvious than they have been lately, but they still represent another preoccupation I have and which I expect to keep showing up. Something very interesting happens in a painting when some of the from is quite finished, realised, and some of it is dissolved.

It reflects some of the way we see, I think, and for me it also reflects impermanence, and uncertainty.

I have a tea-cloth that’s featured in quite a few paintings lately, with light, olive green polka dots on it. It’s this tea cloth. Towards the end of this painting I put the polka dots in but then immediately painted them out again. It wasn’t that they were bad, it was just that the painting didn’t need them. I think having the cloth painted with more brevity is just right for the lemons and the bay leaves. They didn’t need anything arguing with them, trying to take attention away from them.

And these lemons are, after all, kind of special. The come from my local organic shop, as all my recent lemons have, and recently they’ve been getting some very interesting lemons in the shop – oddly shaped, more green than yellow, with little imperfections all over their surface that make them more interesting paint.

So I tried to paint these lemons honestly, to allow them to be themselves. I hope you like them as much as I do.

Best wishes,

Paul