Loaves and fishes Painting

Painted in oil on canvas, this springs from the shape and colour of the fish. The indigo mackerel suggested the red and ochre used for the bread and background. The three oval loaves echoing the oval fish pinned the corners of the table, the colour of which combined the ochre and blue. The grain is scratched in. Someone had told me how one of her clients had lost a sale by explaining the Christian imagery in their picture to an Arab client. That gave me the idea. If you wanted to, you could red this as a reference to one of Christ's miracles, otherwise it is simply what it seems, a still life that maybe hearts back to traditional Netherlandish food/kitchen paintings. The loaves are derived from funerary carvings on a baker's tomb in Rome. The fish were real as was the lemon but that was chosen to echo the oval shape of the basket and i decided to take a bite out of one of the loaves for the same reason!