Cirrus@Austlit

'There's this awareness you sometimes come to in a still life class. Let me explain. It begins workmanlike: sketch in the shapes, block in the tones and colours. After a while you switch to a smaller brush, add highlights, blemishes, the finer points. Still, it does not look quite real. So you pay closer attention to the path of the light, the violence of the shadow - the intricate dance of reflection and refraction, moving all around you, so fast as to appear still. And now your subject is not the fruit, but the dance of that light's motion - rebounding off the taut skin of a pear, swooping through the shadowed hollow of the bowl below and back up again. Suddenly even something as ordinary as an apple seems too much to articulate, too detailed and alive. But if you hadn't tried, you would have only ever seen a bowl of fruit...' (Introduction)