Kitchen Tableau

Kitchen Tableau 2010

Inferior photo from 2005

In an effort to "save" some paintings that I believe have merit but were painted ages ago, I periodically go through my stash of work in the basement. "Kitchen Tableau" is one that I finally took back to the easel after Christmas. The original was painted in 2005 and was inspired by the fact that I was alone at the kitchen table looking at this great bunch of happy flowers. The pear was going to be my dessert.
I repainted the whole thing, leaving the structure as is with very minor modifications. I softened the yellows in the daffodils (using cad yellow light instead of so much cad yellow medium) and got rid of the outlining which is a habit I had. I also worked on blending the color of the flowers into each other to create a bunch of flowers instead of individual flowers. I then put more color (cad yellow light with cerulean blue and white into the wall as I always felt there was a fight between the background beige and the yellow flowers. The two are much more harmonious now. I also warmed the sage green part of the wall. The table top now reads as a unit and the shadows aren't so domineering. The light was coming in from more than one source, which is always tricky (there is a window that is just to to the right of the chair plus the overhead light was on). The wine bottle I added orange to viridian green as the base color and tried to integrate the bottle and the glass to make them read more as a unit. For example, I used the wine color from the glass and added the bottle base color to it to paint the wine left in the bottle. There was a lot of dark colored lines on the sugar "jar" and so I softened all of that. The vase took the least amount of time to "fix." I continued the warming theme with the dark blue of the vase and defined the shapes of the reflections.
As an aside, today I was asked if I still had the painting of the "wine bottle." I am bringing it to work tomorrow to see if the new rendition will pass muster.