Vodniciar Vladimir Still Life «The Pumpkin» — 61x91cm oil on canvas 2026 (2026)

This still life features a vibrant and textured arrangement of a halved Pumpkin. The artist employs warm hues like orange, yellow, and red, contrasted by the bright greens of the peppers. The thick oil paint application emphasizes the tactile quality of the fruits and the draped fabric backdrop, adding depth to the composition. The overall mood is warm and lively, highlighting the natural richness of shapes and colors in the scene. In this Still Life with Pumpkin, I wanted to convey the beauty of this fruit through warm colours, placing it in contrast with the burgundy-red-violet colour of the drapery, so that the overall colour scheme would be full of chromatic energy, expressiveness and pictorial relief. In general, I like the way contrasting colours combine, such as orange with violet and yellow with blue. In this painting, I used the same combination of orange alongside the red-violet of the drapery — through this chromatic vibration, my intention was to make the colours sound and resonate beautifully. I placed the Pumpkin as the central element, cutting it open to bring out its interior colours. By positioning it in the centre, I emphasized it and created a structure that reveals the seeds inside. To create balance, I placed a slice of Pumpkin on the right, changing the orange tone to show the shadow, while on the left I placed these two green peppers and one dark burgundy pepper. I arranged this still life myself and chose to place this violet-reddish drapery in the background and extending onto the table, in order to make the yellow-orange colour of the Pumpkin stand out and create a chromatic connection between all the objects. I painted using the impasto technique not for render the volume of the objects in a highly realistic way, but also, more importantly, to build an expressive pictorial surface in which, through the direction and thickness of the brushstrokes, I could create that artistic language that I personally envision and feel. For me, this freedom of the pictorial gesture is important, because this very expressiveness cannot be reproduced through a simple photographic representation (this goes beyond what a camera can do). I rendered the light and texture of the objects in a free and personal manner, allowing the spontaneous palette knife strokes to bring out the yellow, orange and pink-violet reflections, creating a warm atmosphere throughout the entire painting. I was first inspired to paint this Still Life with Pumpkin in 2008, and now I have returned to it in order to express it in a way that is closer to what I feel and to the way I see it today. My main intention was to bring out the orange-violet colours within a warm atmosphere of objects in which the Pumpkin is the main orange element, viewed against the red-violet drapery, just as the green colour of the peppers resonates with a cool contrast against this same drapery colour.