Yellow Heirloom Tomato

Yellow Heirloom Tomato, 2008, oil on panel, 10 x 8 inches

It's done! I started work on this painting a year ago, when my life seemed to be all over the place. Things affected my work, and soon this painting was put to the side along with other projects. From time to time I would work on it, but it wasn't until recently when I decided to finish it, and to make it the best painting I've done so far. I feel so much better now that this painting is done. There were many things in this painting that posed a challenge. To start I needed to make yellow the focus, a color I don't seem to work well with. My values are always off. But perhaps the greatest challenge was the striped towel. After my first towel painting, I wanted to outdo myself. Little did I know that this time around the towel would be much harder to accomplish. I looked at paintings at the Met that would offer some clue as to how to accomplish this. I kept thinking of Vermeer and his soft fuzzy tapestries and rugs. But in the end I had to figure it out on my own and find the best way I could portray this fabric. So I piled on the paint until I got what I wanted. Now I can move on to other matters, like finishing Steve's portrait.