Tea Pot and Basket of Oranges

After some deliberation, I decided that oranges would probably work best in the composition of this painting. I was contemplating peaches but I didn't see any that I liked at the fruit store. I've had a hankering for painting oranges anyway after seeing Michael Klein's exhibit at Arcadia which featured a great still life of a crate of oranges. They're set back from the more intense light that falls on the pot and cloth, which allowed me to continue my experiments with chroma intensities. In particular I've been looking at Chardin and the way that he sometimes washes the chroma almost completely out of parts of his paintings and yet they still seem wholly plausible. They have the intensity of smoldering embers in a burned out campfire.