A pot of flowers

Something of an experiment, this one – I liked the profusion of flowers, the colour against the stone, but wondered how best to display them.  so there are two attempts fused into one painting.  The colour, after much cogitation and mixing, resolved itself as Ruby Red and Ultramarine Violet, on the left hand side as blobs of colour and on the right as more diffuse shapes dropped into spaces in a green squiggle .  The left hand is nearer to the actual flowers,  but the diffuse side is a bit more exuberant perhaps.

Then I stopped thinking before painting.  The pot was cast cement, white against the creamy stone.  White in shadow is frequently shown as blue, so I painted it using Ultramarine Blue, quite forgetting that I already had Ultramarine Violet in my palette.  I could just about have got away with that if I hadn’t added the pillar behind the pot – in Yellow Ochre.  Blue shadow in yellow tends towards green, too cold for this warm stonework,   so I used Violet.  Now the pot stood out like a sore thumb, its blue modelling vying for attention with the flowers.  I was able to wash out most of the blue and rework it using violet though the blue still shows through.  Thought before action required.