Farmer’s Market Series: Jimmy Nardello Peppers

I’ve been wanting to make a series of vegetable paintings with roughly geometric compositions…not the perfect symmetry of say, Ernst Haekel‘s compositions, but something funkier befitting to veggies. The first painting in the series is a round cabbage, so next I wanted something more linear as a contrast. These peppers reminded me of calligraphic strokes…rather wonky calligraphy…so they seemed perfect.

Technical information

In my color studies, I determined that the predominant color in the peppers corresponded to a pigment called Scarlet Lake, a fairly transparent red orange made by Winsor and Newton. This was my mid-range color. To create form, I used a technique that I learned from the master painter, Fiona Strickland. In the areas in the brightest light where I wanted the shape of the pepper to come forward, I used the color wheel to find the next pigments on the warm side of my basic color, which was Winsor Orange Red Shade and then Permanent Orange. To make the form recede in the shady areas, I went around the color wheel into the cooler reds, like Winsor Red, Daniel Smith Anthraquinoid Red and then M Graham Quinacridone Violet in the shadiest areas. I used only single pigment colors and did very little mixing.