Red Tomatoes - painting a day

"Red Tomatoes" 5x7" oil on canvas panel [$75+shipping]

Red is not a color I usually use a lot of. There's not a lot of pure red in the landscape, unless it's a red barn, and then there's usually a lot of other colors interacting with that red. I found mixing interesting colors more challenging with this painting, because my temptation was to just make the tomatoes all red, straight from the tube. The new tube of Sennelier cadmium red might have something to do with that. But in any case, I found it was harder to see all the other colors in the tomatoes because I was so focused on their redness. This is of course the fundamental challenge of realism - the brain has a lot of information about the objects you observe (tomatoes are red, chairs have legs of equal lengths) that as an artist you have to ignore in order to just see what's right in front of you.