Still lifes will continue until morale improves

"Nights are drawing in," is uttered evenings at my house pretty much as soon as it turns September. By the 21st when the world daylight widget on the clock display turns from the familiar sine wave to a straight line between light and dark, the nights are decidedly drawn in, but it's not the nights that get to me, it's waking in the dark, or at least, waking in the dark gets to me first. Then the dark nibbles the light from both sides, as we pay down the borrowed light from the summer, and I get very intense about gardening, all caught up in anticipatory FOMO^[1], thinking soon the time when I have to be at work and the time when it is light out will very nearly overlap, and what then, eh? Moreover, what if it rains? And worse, what if it doesn't rain?

In either case, the opportunities for plain air painting decrease decidedly with the rain^[2], and decrease further as the days get shorter and there's less and less light to work with, and the overlap of when it's not raining and it's light and I have enough time to go hike to find a subject and paint gets smaller and smaller. Here you may imagine some kind of overlapping shadows slowly eclipsing the small Time Available to Paint Outside.

To cheer myself up, I bought some lovely tulips. Then I painted them.

Even a very quick painting of tulips before I had to go out and use the light for other obligations was quite satisfying. At the time I pained these yellow tulips, the light was right behind them, kind of shining through the petals, an effect that inspired the way I expressed the colors here. That's the sort of thing I find impossible to get a satisfying photo of, yet even a rather simplified painting gets the feeling.

So I bought more tulips the following week, and painted those, too.

It was cloudy day, maybe even rainy, so the light didn't shine through them as much. Also, these were a different color.

Finally, I also bought some cranberry beans and painted one along with a pumpkin and a gourd I previously purchased to celebrate decorative gourd season^[3].

Painting still lifes indoors is more fun, I think, than painting from reference. Of course, there's no pleasing some people.