Dear Julian, what a lovely new "prop"!The old ink bottle with it's thick rim and heavy base and what I see as deposits of old, dried ink is beautifully captured. Pure poetry next to the rich yellow of the little "piquant" Bergamot orange.
Anna.
Wonderful harmony of gray ranges and yellow!
But what strikes me here most is the uncommon position of the lemon! Few painters set up a solitary lemon in that vertical position! The meaning? This is another equivalence of a self-portrait: here, Julian is at his best. We can observe that even the air around him participates to that healthy look; particularly, all along the right outline of the lemon where nervous thin brushstrokes (in the technical spirit of Cezanne) seem to help the lemon standing up straight: atmospherical signs of empathy (but we have to enlarge the picture first to see that). At last,a very enigmatic dash of yellow in the immediate foreground echoes the muted yellow reflection of the bottle mouth giving as a result the "yellow cohesion" of the whole painting and adding depth to the latter. Perhaps this drop of yellow, astray, is a symbol of a small tear of...joy,glad to be free.
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