After a few days of nothing but landscapes it’s back to the fruit. We are going way back to the first four paintings of the year too with pears. I was really tired of painting apples so I headed over to Publix and grabbed a few nice looking green ones. Honestly, I thought with as many apples as I had done that these would be like falling off a log but it took a little more effort. The colors, textures and behavior of the pears are really different and it took some work and experimenting with the colors to make it right.
It’s the red to green transition that is maddening. Red and green are not meant to blend – you get gray in nature but somehow pears work. I just put the red where it was meant to go and the green where it was and used a yellow ocher to help the two play together.