White is such a complex color to capture. It’s never just white, there are layers of colors within it. For this piece, I worked with two premises: first, the stretched format, which forced me to crop into the teapot to create a dynamic composition; second, the challenge of painting white, a white background, white candles, and the white porcelain of both the cup and teapot. The north-facing windows in my studio provided natural light, which gave the overall scene a cooler tone. When I lit the candles, they introduced a pocket of warmth. The real test was depicting the subtle variations of color and tone in the white while still keeping the impression that each element was, in essence, white.
