This week’s featured painting is “Tea with Oranges” from 2017.  It is done with oil on linen, and measures 9 x 12 inches.

I have well over a dozen teapots in my studio, and a few of them have been in multiple paintings.  But as far as I can recall, this painting is the only time I’ve used this particular teapot, aside from a few studies.

That is unfortunate, because it’s a lovely object.  Not only does it have a simple and traditional blue and white glaze, but the shape captures the light in a beautiful way, as though it were flowing across the surface.

That’s actually one of the tricks of the trade – learning to think of light as water flowing through the painting, reacting to and changed by every form it encounters in its path.

Thinking about it this way gives the artist a powerful way to conceptualize what the light is doing, as well as developing finer sensitivity to how the light changes as it passes through.