The Lemon Painting That Started as an Exercise
Most paintings start with a subject I already know I want to paint. A face, a landscape, some shape I keep returning to. Lemons and Lines started differently. It started as homework I gave myself.
I wanted to work through color temperature. Specifically, how light and shadow change what you think you already know about a color. You look at a lemon and your brain says yellow. Simple, flat, settled. But set three of them under a studio lamp and suddenly there are five or six different yellows living on one piece of fruit. Warm where the light hits direct. Cooler, into yellow-green, where the form turns away from the source. Reflected light from the table surface bouncing purples and oranges back up into the shadow passages. That's the thing about this kind of lemon painting, or any still life, really: the subject isn't the lemons. The subject is the light.
Setting Up
I arranged three of them on a board with what I'd call deliberate casualness. It looks like they just landed there, but nothing in a still life just lands. You adjust until the spaces between objects feel right, until the composition has some tension worth painting.
Then I mixed a limited palette and started working alla prima, wet paint into wet paint, no coming back. That's the other thing about this piece that shaped it: there's no underdoing it and fixing it later with a glaze over a dry layer. Each stroke commits. On a 12 by 16 board you don't have a lot of room to wander. The pace is fast. Every mark has to land.
What the Shadows Were Doing
The color work was the interesting part. Getting each note pure, without muddying it, while still building convincing form across the surface of each fruit. The warm yellows in the light passages, the cooler shifts into the halftones, the purples sitting in the cast shadows where you'd least expect purple to be. It's the kind of problem that sounds straightforward and isn't.
The background I worked with a palette knife, building up some texture against the smoother surface of the fruit. That contrast became part of what the painting is about: rough against smooth, loose against careful. In still life you get to control the light, which means you get to slow down and push those relationships further than outdoor painting ever lets you. Plein air is about speed and instinct. The studio is about attention.
The Composition I Didn't Plan
Something happened during the session I hadn't fully anticipated. Lemons are round objects. The setup around them, the hard line of the table edge, the vertical shapes in the background, was architectural. And once those two things were both on the board, they were in conversation. Organic against geometric. Nature's curves against human-made lines. I didn't plan that tension when I arranged the setup, but once I saw it, the painting got more interesting. Those are the moments worth chasing.
The title came from that: Lemons and Lines. The roundness of the fruit. The structure underneath.
The Painting
Ultimately, while this painting was challenging, the lessons it taught me were invaluable, and it has become one of my favorites in recent memory. If you want to own it for yourself, it is available among several other works.