Prior to this painting, i did a color still life painting of a different pear. when my art instructor, Neilson Carlin, saw my black and white photo of that other painting, he challenged me to paint a still life using only grey paints.

an artist, i forget his name, said that colors are just different values on a grey value scale. (i think he said something like that.) try this, if you squint your eyes so that just enough light passes between your eyelids, the colors before you will appear as though reduced to grey values falling somewhere between black and white. i have never painted in grey before, so in this painting exercise, i wanted to see if i could paint using only grey values ranging between 10 (“white”) through zero (”black”). it was a challenging exercise that involved frequent squinting, while at the same time translating the colors into grey values.