I love seeing the unique opportunities in every day objects and their compositions. This painting was conceived with the idea of colorful stripes and texture. Fall gourds are naturally striped. Onions and lemons have sections suggesting the opportunity for enhanced color. The basket was another structural opportunity for colorful stripes. The planks of the table and ribbed pot complete the striped theme. The lettuce in the basket is texture. The blue seen through the window is a rich textural blue made up of dots of all colors and lots of variations of blue. Last, I just had fun with colorful highlights on the table because I thought the effect was pleasing. I have saved the whites by using the white background color of the paper as my table top and for highlights on the fruit as a fresh counterpoint to the color of the rest.
Recognize the basket? It is a colorful, fauvist version of the one in Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Fruit Basket, 1880-90. I like knowing that Cezanne also picked elements for his compositions from different sources with the goal of a pleasing painting.
Two particularly colorful Cezanne still life paintings are A Still Life with Apples, Bottle and Milk Pot, 1902-06 and Still Life: Apples, Bottle and Chairback. In the painting with a Milk Pot bold yellow and blue are accented with red. In the paintings with a Chairback bold red and blue are accented with yellow. Cezanne has saved his whites as well for the translucent, fresh and highlighted effects.
I was pleasantly surprised to find two wonderful, fairly realistic, early still lifes by Henri Matisse. Still Life with Pitcher and Fruit, 1898 and Fruit and Coffee Pot, 1898 show an exciting emphasis on texture. Matisse's Poppies- Fireworks, 1919 and Interior with an Egyptian Curtain, 1948 show his fully developed style of patterns, color and texture.
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