Blue Bottle with Lemons

I started this a couple of months ago and something seemed wrong
with it. Yesterday I was drawn to working on it again, changed the
background and tabletop colors, a few touches to soften the lemons
and it feels much better. My trial and error with figures has shown me
that I don't see (as in assess) my own work very well. I can leave the
studio in the evening feeling I'd done a good day's work and be excited
about getting to the studio in the morning, only to find that the painting
was so terrible I questioned why it excited me the day before. It makes
me not trust what I see when I look at my own work. After some time
passes and a little more work, I feel more confident in my judgment.
Does anyone else have this distrust or visual confusion?

This one's a push for less literalness and experimenting with color.

Plums on Pink

It was fun to paint a 6 x 6 after these past few weeks of trying to
paint figures. Working on the figures has made me realize how little
I know about value in color. Or, whatever I know is intuitive but not
clear enough to articulate in my head while mixing colors. I tried to
limit the values in this one.