Happy Monday!

Between Orchard and Pie ©2008 Karen Mathison Schmidt
6 x 6 • acrylic on Gessobord

Sold • private collection, Bethesda, MD

Happy Monday everyone!

I finished this painting on Friday, but haven’t taken the time to post it here until now. Hey, I’ve been busy!

Last week after I brought these yummy pieces of fruit home and arranged them (yes, "arranged" – I’m kind of visually compulsive, I have to admit) in a vintage footed milk glass bowl on our kitchen table, they were just begging to be made into a painting, so I obliged. I sure would like to say these luscious beauties came from Ed Lester’s Farm down the road a piece, but I’d be lying. As it so happens, they came from Super Target. A spur-of-the-moment buy during a milk-and-bread run. Somewhere down the line they came from some orchard on somebody’s fruit farm somewhere, I’m sure. Well, wherever they came from they were lip-smackin’ good! (Needless to say, they never made it to the pie stage.)

Here are work in progress photos – first, the initial sketch in mars black, then blocking in the main areas of color ...



Then (in the picture below) I added color glazes to deepen the underpainting: a Pthalo green glaze over the apples, Quinacridone violet over the peaches, giving them a kind of magenta-ish cast, and cobalt blue glaze over everything else. I went with a purple-yellow palette for this one – in other words, I tried to keep the colors of the entire painting toward the purple and yellow for the most part, steering away from true reds, greens and blues. Any reds are more orange or magenta, greens are yellowish, and the blues I used are purplish. This gives the painting as a whole a more coherent and balanced feel, color-wise.


... and here are a couple of details ...