Chromacolour acrylic on MDF board. 59x79cm. Completed 7th April 2010.

I believe the Dutch still life painters were simply the greatest ‘recorders’ of what I like to call ‘the surface of things’. This is a contemporary version of the type of work done by the likes of Jan Davidsz de Heem or Willem Kalf, Dutch genre painters of the seventeenth century. The Dutch masters were the first true photorealists.

This is based on a photograph I took late in 2009 and it features a mango, bananas, a blue swimmer crab, a pineapple, a chinese hand painted bowl with capsicum, peaches, strawberries and grapes in it – there is a wedge of blue cheese, a seashell, a gold vase with roses and even a snowflake curio object in the painting. The table was a round one topped off with a difficult to paint cloth which is what I call ‘flip-flop’ colored. I think the technical term would refer to it as ‘interfering’ with the light.