This was my first excursion into the theme of refraction for which I chose the challenging randomness and intricacy of a Coca-Cola bottle. For the first half of the painting process, I felt frustration that the piece wasn’t looking the way I thought it should. It took quite a while for the bottle to reveal itself. I found myself fighting the texture of the canvas to get the level of detail I wanted to work with, and upon completion, I was actually disappointed in the finished painting.

After a while, I began to appreciate the ‘painterly’ quality of the piece and soon found myself loving it. I enjoyed working with both foreground and background ‘bokeh’ which are the out-of-focus points of light, represented by discs of color, such as the large green circles behind it (which are actually sunlit leaves). Of course the title refers to the fact that this image is really about the reflection of the bottle off the shiny wooden top of this end table.