Still Life with Roses in a Chinese Vase 1927

Samuel Peploe made this painting, Still Life with Roses in a Chinese Vase, with oil on canvas. Look at how the colours sit next to each other, the blues and the oranges. They vibrate! Peploe is playing with making form, and then dissolving it again. He's very interested in texture. You can really see the marks he's made with his brush. In the centre of the canvas, notice the white vase, and the blue markings on its surface. The brushstrokes here are quite animated, and sort of scribbled and playful. The roses are also a flurry of marks, with no hard lines. Look at the peach, too. The application of paint is so tactile; you can feel the surface. And that's what it's about, right? How the painting, the paint itself, is part of what it’s showing us. Like with Cézanne, there's this feeling of dissolving form. You can almost feel him searching for form within the paint.