Lemons were chosen for the specific difficulty of their yellow — a colour that reads differently in warm and cool light and refuses to sit still across a painting session as the ambient conditions shift. This canvas was worked across four afternoons to accumulate that variability.
The cloth beneath the fruit was repainted twice. Its final tone — warmer than it first appears — was arrived at by looking at what the lemons needed rather than what the cloth looked like, which is the correct order of decisions in this kind of still life.
About the artist
Radu Marinescu makes his paintings outside, working directly from the landscape in all conditions. Weather is not a problem to be managed but a material condition of the work — the humidity of the air affects how watercolour moves, the light changes faster than the hand can follow, and these constraints produce a quality of urgency that studio work rarely achieves.
He works primarily in the Carpathians, the Danube Delta, and along the Black Sea coast. His background in architecture shows in his attention to the underlying structure of a landscape — the rhythm of a treeline, the geometry of a riverbank, the way a village organises itself against a hillside. He does not take commissions.
