About this piece
Four satsumas on a white dish, the striped tablecloth beneath them doing more visual work than anything else in the frame. Satsumas is a still life that earns its quiet — the fruit rendered with enough specificity that you can almost smell the rind, the warm oranges and reds playing against the cooler stripes without competing.
Still lifes are easy to paint badly and hard to paint well. The difficulty is in making something ordinary feel chosen rather than convenient. These four pieces of fruit, on this dish, on this cloth: the specificity is the whole point.