Still life paintings

The scale, availability and controllability of still life give me the opportunity to explore and develop many aspects of painting technique and approach. Thus these paintings are always celebrations of light, colour, surface and volume, as well as being descriptions of the pieces of fruit, and have been influenced by the still life paintings of Morandi, Cezanne, Chardin and many European still life painters of the seventeenth century.

They are concerned with the interaction between objects and light, and are painted from observation in direct sunlight at particular times of the day and year. The light is theatrical, alighting on objects, enhancing surface and detail.

The paintings are in acrylic or watercolour on paper, using a small number of colours, and controlling the mixes to make as wide and intense a range of the nuances of observed colour as possible. A sympathetic base colour is often used, and the colours are then closely and delicately applied over it, both by mixing and by the gradual accumulation of many layers.

The simple minimal compositions help to highlight the unique geography, the variety and individuality of the pieces of fruit, and tiny incidents of shape and colour can count considerably. They seem to jostle silently against one another, each with its own weight, rhythm, energy, volume, colour and identity. They are often arranged in a row, and so do not compromise one other by overlapping.

I have also recently started a series of studies of old discarded boots and shoes, found by chance, and painted in oil on paper , considerably larger than life size.