Still Life with Fruit and Brass Bowl

Before the temple wall there was the studio table. This 2018 canvas is a classical still life of the kind painted to learn the discipline of light: a brass bowl at the centre, fruit spilling forward onto a dark ledge, and a wall behind graded from cream at the upper left to deep brown at the right.

The two bunches of grapes carry the picture. The dark bunch is built from plum and violet with a single cool highlight on each berry, and a few grapes left translucent so the light seems to pass through them; the pale bunch to the right moves from green to warm gold, with the same disciplined highlight repeated forty times over without ever going mechanical.

The brass bowl is the technical centrepiece — its rim ruled in a thin lit line, its body warmed from yellow to orange-brown, and a small incised flower motif on the belly picked out in pale ochre. Inside it a peach, a plum and a red apple sit against the leaves.

The leaves are the connective tissue: broad, veined and turned at different angles, some green, some going brown at the tip, keeping the arrangement from settling into a simple pyramid. Curling tendrils drawn in single strokes break the silhouette against the wall.

It is the most Western piece in the collection, and it explains a good deal about the murals that followed: the patience for a hundred small highlights, and the habit of building a form colour by colour until it turns.