"Lettuce and Tomatoes"

"Lettuce and Tomatoes" -- oil on canvas 16x20" -- Margie Guyot

This is the first painting I did after the holidays, right when everybody's thinking about diets and salads!  I'd just finished a still life recently that had this same green bowl in it.  It was such a "hoot" to do, I had to do another one.  Don't you love the greenish shadow it casts?  I'm fascinated by glass (although this bowl was really plastic!) and how it distorts shapes.  Why scrub floors when you can paint glass?

We rarely get sunny days in winter up here, so there is hardly ever a true, strong sense of shadow shapes -- only a fuzzy suggestion. 

Another thing that's captured my fascination lately has been the colors of the shadows.  It seems the local color of an object (such as the carrots) affects its shadow.  Notice the faint tinge of orange next to the carrots?  And the faint tinge of red next to the red pepper?  The cold and winter snows help eliminate distractions up here in the north so we artists can notice things we might otherwise miss.