Charles Reid workshop—Day 3/Still life

Today was the first of two days of still life painting. As usual, we had a quick critique of yesterday's work and then Charles spent the rest of the morning painting the still life below. I'm not sure I quite understand the still life process of setting up a lot of random things placed on the table, but Charles made it beautiful. Watching him paint the pitcher on the right was amazing and I love the paint brush and tube of paint which was added at the very end to fill a hole.

I was a bit late getting back from lunch and found Charles outside, in the rain, pacing, smoking his pipe and looking like an outdoorsman out of the L.L.Bean catalog. He asked if I was avoiding the chaos going on inside. Of course I said "yes". I guess 12 of us had to position ourselves around three still life set-ups and agree on the position of the elements. Charles was insistent that it was chaos and I should consider sneaking into the small quiet room which would have been against the rules because I was in group #2 which was part of the "large room of chaos". I looked him in the eye and said "I'm going in". 

Above is what I managed to find to paint after I angled a position around one of the random still life set-ups. No one else wanted the decoy or anything else in my painting, so I went for it. Actually everyone was really so agreeable and it was nothing more than a little adult controlled chaos.