This still life came out of an online course I took in 2020 when I was living in Moscow, which was taught by the Azerbaijani artist Samir Rakhmanov. It was called “Decorative Methods in Painting.” This was one of my first courses in painting, and its goal was to enrich painters by introducing them to compositional techniques and new visual methods in order to represent different objects and textures. I had thought arranging a still life would be easy, but came to appreciate that it is an art form in itself. The course referred to the works of such 19th century painters as Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and I enjoyed the colourful and joyful aesthetic that emerged.