"Summer Breakfast"

I noticed that during summertime for two hours in the afternoon I have direct sunlight coming into one corner of my studio. Usually I would avoid these kind of light conditions and rather go for a stable light - halftone - shadow situation. What fascinated and inspired me though was the idea of breaking the rules and painting pure sunlight falling onto white objects. While setting it up and finding an interesting composition I already saw all colors of the rainbow reflected on the objects and reacting differently on the textures of each surface. Challenging enough those colors kept changing constantly throughout the two hours as the sun was moving. I felt it was almost more observing what was actually happening than painting it. Understanding what was going on and making the right selection of information to make the painting work as a whole. It has been a great experience, painting with pure colors, almost like the impressionists did, but in a classical realistic set up and catching the feeling of a nice Sunday morning breakfast during summer. Last week I got notice that this painting has been selected for the final round in the Syrlin-Kunstpreis competition and it will be exhibited in several places during spring 2012 in Germany, starting out with Stuttgart in January.