Grapes, Pear and a White Teapot

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Comment by Annie Cullen on February 21, 2012 at 17:46

And I like the idea of moving the background grapes to the other side...it would really have helped the composition...

Comment by Annie Cullen on February 21, 2012 at 17:39

Thanks Richard, I appreciate all your comments - and will definitely work on those things. The whole lost and found edges thing is something I've never really done and I can see now how important it is. Shadows - their tone, colour and softness/hardness are always a challenge. Thanks again.

Comment by Richard Robinson on February 20, 2012 at 15:39

Hi Annie, thanks for your painting, here are some thoughts...

Design

It's an interesting choice putting the white teapot on a white base and the way the deep red from the grapes is echoed in the background makes me think of the Yin & Yang symbol - dark on light, light on dark. I would have been tempted to place the background grapes behind the left side of the teapot to help balance it out in that direction. It seems a little like a ship with all it's cargo balance on the bow at the moment. Just a thought.

Colour

It's so tricky to mix those grays in the white jug isn't it!? I really struggled with that too. You haven't quite captured the subtlety of the colour/value gradation around the jug so it's ended up a little flat, but you really made this hard on yourself with the white base being reflected into the shadow side of the jug which makes the difference between dark and light very subtle indeed and you've painted the core shadow a little to dark here - you're close though! The grapes are great, so no worries there, but the pear needs a little deeper shadow side and no so much white in the lights which have gone a bit pasty and lost the powerful green that was available to you there. If you try painting a pear without using any white (except for using white in the mixture for the highlight), you can avoid getting pasty colour there. The same goes for a lot of things actually - we often reach for the white far too soon in our mixtures at the expense of truely rich colour. Your base looks to be suffering from the same problem, besides it being slightly too light - especially on the left side where it's furthest from the light.

Brushwork

A little to much fiddling and glazing with thin layers here for my liking, but hey that's just where you are at the moment. As I suggested to Stephen and anyone wanting to paint 'looser' more expressive paintings, try bigger brushes, more paint, stepping back from the canvas every few strokes and squinting or defocusing your eyes every time you look at your subject - remember it's the big shapes of colour we are after. If you get those right with the right soft or hard edges the jigsaw comes together from a few feet away. To me it's the difference between writing a poem or a song about a subject, or a long- winded clinical essay about its visual properties. Easier said than done though.

Realism

I've picked your painting apart but it's actually a pretty darn good rendition of the subject and I know you haven't done many still life paintings so I think you've done very well. One thing I noticed you working on here was the lost and found edges which is fantastic - keep going with that! I'd caution you to look again at the cast shadow edges under the front edge of the grapes however - the softness in your painting goes against the properties of the other shadows you so carefully built. Remember soft edges on cast shadows speak of a diffused light source or a longer distance from the object casting the shadow. Again, picking. Overall, pretty good I thought.

Comment by Annie Cullen on February 10, 2012 at 10:25

Thanks Julie - my Grandaughter  2 who lives on the other side of the world, wanted to eat a grape!

Comment by Julie Wickham on February 9, 2012 at 21:38

You've done a great job - l like the reflected light from the grapes onto the white teapot.