Splendor In The Mess Sold

Here's another I will need to paint again . . . it's from a photo I took
late last year of the tangerines I'd picked and set on my messy kitchen
island. One morning, the sun slanted in at a beautiful angle and bleached
the leaves on the one at right. Fortunately, my camera was right there in the
midst of bills, papers, magazines . . . This photo offered a wealth of
challenges and also illustrated them quite clearly for me. The short focal
length blurred everything behind the main subjects, bleached out the
lights and gave me more depth than I can invent in my shadow-box.
My set-ups often seem so dull whatever I do with the lighting. There was
also so much information that it forced me to paint the shapes and values,
a much-needed exercise to keep tipping my brain towards thinking that way,
but what I haven't done as well as I hoped was to capture the blurry whites
through the center. They're quite blazing in the photo but behave and recede
just like they're supposed to. When I painted them as bright as I saw them,
they totally misbehaved---something to be aware of and work at: how to
capture whites/lights in a background? This mess is pretty much an example
of "home" for me. Should I post it for the Japan Challenge?