Passover Meal

Passover Meal-finished pience

mock up

  The first year I came back I found the house a lot more religious than when I left it. I think that it was this feeling of uncertainty that cause me to paint this piece. This is the first pass over, at the end of the night when everyone's eaten and are too exhausted to move. In terms of my aim technically, this piece was to see how much detail I could include into a relatively small painting. 
I painted the majority of this piece in the early portion of the third year, and then left it kicking around for the rest of the year having given up. The detail and the figures were pretty much finished but I couldn't get the depth at all correct. The reason for this was that I'd gone too dark and too light in the tonal distribution. I painted the doors straight black, the highlights white and it made everything look immediately washed out.

Example of tonal range by my tutor

  This meant that, when I came back to it at the end of the year having had the tonal stuff drummed into me quite effectively my my tutor, I knew very quickly what needed to be changed. I simply needed to darken the lightest bits and darken the highlights.
  The other thing which was changed was the light. It was something I was proud of but every single person was telling me was wrong. Eventually I gave in and painted it out. When I came back to this painting I thought it would take me a week or so to get it to a level I was happy to exhibit- the light took me half an hour and door frame ten or so minutes. Very very simple things but it made the difference.
  This piece isn't really my style but I am proud of it. Its fun painting small things and I enjoyed the process it took to add so much detail. I'm not sure of the merits of the painting but purely as an exercise I think it taught me a lot.