The Blue Vase

G often reads to me while I'm painting and the book I'm enjoying most at the moment is A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, which details a series of conversations between the late great artist and his friend the art critic Martin Gayford. It's an absolutely fascinating insight into Hockney's life and the art which has lit up the world for decades. One particular passage which struck me was a discussion about perspective, and how when an artist is focused on a subject in a scene, that subject becomes disproportionately larger on the canvas, which is exactly what happened to me with this painting. In my original sketch the vase was actually a champagne glass, but when I looked at the canvas the next day I realized that the champagne glass I had drawn was actually as big as the champagne bottle itself! I thought it was a bit too out of scale (even for me!) so I decided I would turn it into a vase, which I think has worked out quite nicely. Cheers!