Solitude Sonata is an expressive figurative piano oil painting, a small canvas of a single figure seated at an upright piano. Hand-painted in oil, sized for a study, a music room, or a wide hallway.
Solitude Sonata is a figure study: a single person seated at an upright piano, head down, hands somewhere on the keys. The painting is small by our standards, and the brushwork is loose. You do not see fingers, you see the posture. That is the point.
The palette is muted. Brown, ochre, a soft blue-grey in the background. The figure is rendered in slightly darker tones, so the silhouette reads even from across a room. The texture is moderate, not impasto, which keeps the mood quiet. This is not a painting that wants to be the loudest thing in the room. It wants to be the stillest thing in the room.
The piano is rendered as a flat dark shape with very little detail, and the wall behind it is almost the same color as the wall around the painting in our studio. We did that on purpose, because we wanted the figure to be the only thing the eye lands on. The piano and the wall are scenery. The person is the subject. If you are the kind of person who looks at a painting and counts the objects in it, this might not be the one for you. If you are the kind who looks at a painting and feels something before you have figured out why, it probably is.
Single-figure pieces are good for the kind of space where you would actually play a piano. A study, a music room, a wide hallway. If you have a real piano, the painting goes above it. If you do not, it goes on a wall where you already pause, and it makes the pause longer. It is also a good piece for a reading corner, where the figure is company without being a person.
The painting is part of our figurative range and the smallest of the three. The other two pieces in the same range have more figures and a wider canvas. If you want the same mood with a different subject, the abstract figurative range has a few pieces that work in similar rooms.
