Vodniciar Vladimir Still Life «The Basket with Apples» — 61,5x91,5cm oil on canvas 2026 (2026)

This still life depicts a tipped wicker basket spilling out a collection of apples in shades of yellow, red, and green. The painting features textured brushstrokes that add depth and tactile quality to the canvas. The background blends blue and golden hues, providing a warm and luminous contrast. The composition conveys a serene and realistic mood, emphasizing the simple beauty of everyday objects. The basket is placed on a white drapery, and the apples, having different shapes and colours, each have their own shape, position and colour within this simple and, at the same time, beautiful composition. I painted mainly with both the brush and the palette knife, bringing more colour into the light, while preserving the tone in the shadows through glazes and half-tones. I brought the foreground forward by emphasizing the texture of the drapery resting on the corner and edge of the table that extends into the foreground — here, I used more palette knife strokes in various shades and tones of yellow and green tending towards ochre. Through the intense yellow, ochre and golden shades of the apples, I wanted to preserve the sunlight within the painting, while the orange and intense red colours of the apples introduced accents of energy, vitality and spontaneity. Given that the basket of apples rests on a white drapery extending from the background, I created harmony and coherence with the apples by adding white impasto highlights to their illuminated areas. My aim was to paint this still life in a free manner using impasto, as I felt it, creating colour-stroke effects with a softer effect in the background. On the right side, I painted the sky as a background with vibrations of cerulean blue, azure and turquoise, so that this contrast in the background would cool the atmosphere — while, through the palette knife strokes, the texture and the intense colour, I made the warm colours of the apples on the table stand out more, thereby highlighting the richness of the warm tones and creating a balance between light and freshness. This still life featuring this basket of apples is a Work of Authorship — Vodniciar, because I purchased these objects and arranged them in this way for the first time in 2008, in order to paint it at the School of Fine Arts as a teaching model for children. A white frame suits this painting because it supports the white drapery and allows the colours to breathe. Overall, in this painting, I wanted to convey calmly, through colours, a scene of warm energy — that of simple and familiar things that awaken an emotion in us without needing many words.