Sloe-ing Things Down

graphite & watercolour/30x20cm

A little seasonal adjustment & change of object matter today, although, maintaining a shred of integrity, the items of small fruit that provide the subject(s) happen to have been found, encountered as habitual during the course of one's perambulations-about-town, scattered along a stretch of pavement & kerbside, upon which they & numerous others had fallen, naturally from their lofty perches.

Returned home, the objects were scattered as casually as they had previously fallen, upon the 'studio' windowsill, to be then contemplated, in the interests of representation, & thus accordingly slightly rearranged into something of a composition, with certain spatial intervals, etc..
Following a light pencil sketching-in-place, the application of colour began, taking care to try as far as possible to render the vibrancy of the range of colours & also preserve the luminosity of the fruits, seen at its best as the objects were being observed 'contre jour', with what available light there was filtering, glowing through their translucent forms: this is something I often find attractive, for the challenge such presents in attempting to communicate a sense of form - a three-dimensional representation is more easily achieved if the object(s) in question are being thrown into light & shade by a light source raking-in from the side, obviously.
As the painting progressed, it became necessary in this instance to represent the objects within the spatial continuum in which they were being observed, from which they stood out yet existed within, particularly as the grey backdrop heightened the complementary hues of the fruits & caused the edges of their forms (from which ground they are 'carved') to appear, in places, to vibrate - in the manner of the flux of Cezanne's 'envelope' of light & air - however still the objects themselves might be: indeed, whilst the reflections behind the fruit suggest spatial recession, they somehow fuse with the objects themselves to render such depth unstable. Further to this, the reflective surface of the windowsill upon which the objects sit allows the scope to represent them a third time, adding another element to the overall surface dynamic.