Still Life painting with artist’s reflection in a metallic bowl

Painting from life is a thrilling experience. This is the first time I have painted a metallic bowl and you can see my reflection in it.

I keep admiring things all around all the time whether travelling or at home. The petals of flowers, colours of foliage, flowers on the trees, light and dark patches of green fields, mountain ranges,  sunlit snow capped peaks and so on. The inspiration for this painting came from an unusual source.

As I was looking around the house for inspiration, I felt like painting a bowl. Painting a bowl is close to my flower vases. But which bowl to paint; a bone china one, a crystal one or a glass one? I thought that nothing would reflect better than a metallic one. I have placed fruits with flowers in couple of previous still life paintings but never painted vegetables ever. This was an experiment that I was conducting for the first time. I put together colourful vegetables available at that moment and placed everything on a yellow cutting board on my painting table. I filled up the bowl with tomatoes. Juggled around a bit to place capsicum, onion and brinjal around the bowl. Finally I was happy with my composition and started painting.

The arrangement was placed next to my palette. I was looking down on the arrangement from right hand side. Light was shining on the objects from the window on the left. There were so many reflections in the metallic bowl. I noticed so many colours in ordinary onion. It’s outer peel towards the left added another dimension to the composition. The copper bottomed bowl shows the reflections of three vegetable pieces placed around it. It also shows the reflection of yellow cutting board. I am also there. I had not thought about it before the start of the painting process, otherwise another colour could have been added to the composition with the change of dress. This being my first attempt at painting metallic bowl, I kept looking at it again and again to determine whether the colour was white, cream, dark blue, brown, black or dark green in various parts. The rim has so many colours.

This is an alla prima painting. I forgot to take the pictures before the start of painting. I took a few after I finished painting but none reflects the angle from which I was looking. I am happy with the end result. I am amazed that beauty can be found in such mundane things. The only concern is ‘How will it look on my Facebook page (Paintings by Navdeep Kular) and  Instagram feed(@navdeepkular_oilpaintings) with all the floral paintings? Should I even post it there?’ What do you say? As of now, this unique painting catches attention while drying  with floral paintings all around it.

Happy browsing!