Art project / acrylic class

Acrylic still lifes.

Five weeks at the Vero Beach Art Museum: one painting a week, each one a study in composition, highlights, shadows, and complementary color.

Acrylic still life of pears and apples in a white bowl. — Pears and apples in a white bowl: one of the studies where highlights made the objects come alive.

This project came from another class at the Vero Beach Art Museum, focused entirely on still life painting.

The class ran for five weeks, with the goal of one painting each week. The sequence was three fruits, pears on a plate, a Brillo box arrangement, roses, and the final French bowl setup.

The subject matter was only part of the lesson. The real work was learning how to compose the objects, how to place highlights, how to find the shadows, and how to make those shadows richer by using complementary color rather than simply darkening the paint.

What made it interesting was how technical the seeing became. A vase, a pear, a red box, or a jar stopped being a named object and became a set of edges, reflected colors, warm and cool planes, and choices about what to emphasize.

Five weekly studies.

The finished pieces are shown as a class sequence: each week a different object problem, each object a different way to study light.

Acrylic still life with red fruit and pear on striped cloth. — Week 1, May 2026: three fruits.

Acrylic still life of pears and apples on a plate. — Week 2, May 2026: pears on a plate.

Acrylic still life with Brillo box, can, pitcher, and bowl. — Week 3, May 2026: Brillo box arrangement.

Acrylic still life of red roses in a vase. — Week 4, May 2026: roses.

Acrylic still life with Eiffel Tower jar, decorative tin, and small boxes. — Week 5, May 2026: French bowl and objects.

Two favorites.

These are the two paintings from the class that stayed with me most, because each one taught me something specific about how painting works.

Roses.

I was especially happy with the shading on the vase and the use of very different colors in its surface, including a green at the front. I liked the way the table and wall were mottled, and I especially liked how small brush strokes in the roses, which were actually quite easy to do, gave the impression of a large amount of detail that is not really there.

To me, this was an achievement in the style of impressionist painting I was seeking: enough visual information for the viewer's eye to complete the object.

Acrylic still life of pears and apples on a white plate.

Fruit on a plate.

The key for me was how the painting came alive when I carefully copied the actual highlight patterns that I saw in the real objects. It taught me that highlights are not intuitive. You have to really look.

The viewer's brain knows when it looks real, even if the viewer cannot say exactly why. That was the lesson: light is specific, and the painting becomes more convincing when I stop inventing it and start observing it.

The still life class turned ordinary objects into a technical exercise in seeing: composition first, then light, then shadow, then color.