A single Golden Delicious apple on a plain wooden surface — a subject chosen because the particular yellow-green of that variety is one of the most technically demanding colours in oil painting: simultaneously warm and cool, saturated and muted, never staying the same between sessions as the light changes.
The painting was worked over eleven sessions across two months. The wood surface beneath the apple was the most reworked passage, with the warm grain of the wood needing to be present but quiet enough to allow the apple's colour to remain dominant.
About the artist
Gabriela Stan works slowly and with great deliberateness — a single painting can take three to six months from the first preparatory study to the final varnish. This pace is not a limitation but a methodology: she is interested in what sustained looking produces over time, and how a painting changes when it is returned to repeatedly across different moods and light qualities.
Her subjects are drawn from still life and the studio interior — spaces she can control and return to. She does not paint from photographs, on the principle that the absence of the original light introduces a fundamental dishonesty. She accepts commissions for still life and interior work from collectors who understand the extended timeline.
