Mother's Pottery #4

Mother's Pottery #4

8x6in  oil on canvas panel    100.

The round bowl with the floating lemons has my mothers fingerprints where she made little depressions in the clay...just like when she was making a pie crust. We use this bowl almost every morning for a fruit salad and sometimes I find myself resting my own fingertips in the indentations, feeling her vibrations.

Mother often had a bowl of floating lemons in water and she would rest the back of her hands in the water for a while and, as she never had one brown spot on her hands, she believe it worked!

Artist Note.

I started this off with a drawing done with a round brush using Ultra Blue in a thin, transparent manner. I lifted off any errors quite cleanly. After massing in the shapes I lifted out the lemon slices using a thirsty brush and then a cloth to make sure it was dry to the touch so it would not pollute the yellow paint when I put it in. On something like this if I had painted the yellow in first I would have had to be careful not to pollute the blue.
The tricky part was painting the water in the bowl.  I really had to be aware of the subtle difference in value and color, above and below the waterline. The bowl has a swath of creamy white which runs in an abstract manner in-between two shades of blue glazes. There is no way I could capture it so I went for the overall effect. This is something most of us have to learn. Just because it IS a certain way does not mean you HAVE to paint it that way (if it looks awkward.)
For the lemons it helps to remember that yellow in the shade moves to a middle/darker value. I used a red/purple in these to tone down the value of the yellow where I wanted it darker and warmer and
a blue/purple for the greener, cooler shade.