Or maybe it’s about simple complexity. You incorporate the round shapes of different sizes with sweeping diagonal brush strokes. This is a consistent method you use that mixed with your mastery of color makes your paintings feel so alive. You also put the bowl and fruit and ball right in the center, with a visual perspective of looking down on them which emphasized the circular shapes which are all clustered together, but the addition of the diagonal grain of the wooden countertop keeps the scene from being static. And you use strong primary colors that contrast with each other in shapes within the roundness of each apple which are all surrounded by the blues of the interior of the bowl.
Your use of light also plays a complex role which you include in all your paintings too. You incorporate direct light in the form of the sparkling shine on the surface of the apples and indirect light in some of the apples by making their shadow edges just a bit lighter than the shadow sides. And this also works When you outline the shadow edge of the apples with a thin white line. It gives the apples a curved look on the shaded side, and adds an impression of roundness to the flat circular shape. This is why it feels like complex simplicity. It’s the interplay of flatness and curved roundness.
And one of your occasional trademark addition of an unrelated object is what tells a story which actually has nothing to do with the rest of the still life. This shouldn’t work but in your paintings it always does work. It makes the viewer stop and pay attention because of the discrepancy and that’s where the storytelling begins. In the viewer’s own imagination. You paint nature in your still lives and then incorporate a man made object which puts the painting on a somewhat different trajectory in our minds, adding an element that catches our imagination. A story.
I like that you do this thing with objects. That you turn baseballs, wrenches and completely unrelated objects into still life art and it works. It fits.
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