Still life with Spanish guitars, quinces and fans Painting

For this painting I decided to continue with the Cubist theme, inasmuch as using the repeated motifs of the guitars and fans. The quinces weren’t repeated, they were real! Well most of them were. The painting began by laying the guitar onto an octagonal table top, and looking at how I’d like to arrange the painting. An internal frame was inserted, and the guitars repeated. The fans were placed, and the quinces drawn in. I started painting began in Veridian green and pink… which changed to red, then yellow and green, dark blue. I paint a lot of layers when using acrylic, to produce a flat even surface. Sometimes it takes quite a while to work out the colours so the layers will most likely consist of a variety of colours until I feel the painting ‘works’. This took a long time. I used different types of shading, linea ‘hatching’, vertical and diagonal, brushy shading and bubble dots. It became a complex image, as I worked to resolve the balance between the guitars. I also used stencils for the floral pattern which overflows from the yellow central fan into the larger guitar. Despite all this, the octagonal angles are still visible in parts and repeated lower down on the body of the central guitar.