trio 10x8

I haven't done too many still life paintings lately. The garden at school is overflowing with tomatoes and other stuff so I thought I'd try something a little larger. My students kept asking me what these three objects had to do with each other. It made me think about what we all bring to a painting. I've done so many paintings of these individual objects that I'm not really looking at them the same way as my students. When they see a tomato they see something you eat. When they see linseed oil they see a painting medium and to them, a feather is a part of a chicken. They tend to focus on what the thing is for or where it's from. When I selected these items I just saw a solid red organic mass, a semi-translucent amber artifact and something taller than the other two objects. I'm not really focusing on an item's purpose while I'm painting it. Putting several items together automatically creates some kind of narrative but the narrative isn't in the painting. It's in the viewer. I like that kind of interaction.