Still life art was an important genre within the career of Georges Braque and he found this an accessible way to work, where each individual element could be tweaked precisely to the look desired by the artist. He also could touch every item in the scene which brought a level of tactility to his work. In that sense, he prefered this to landscape art, where he had no control over what he could see, other than perhaps the angle that he chose to paint from and the time of day that he did it. This would become more significant in around a decade's time, when he would work with still life as his first choice, during his cubist period. By that point he was exchanging ideas with Picasso on an almost daily basis as they sought to expand upon their original idea that would spawn this new movement.
This depiction of Five Bananas and Two Pears is less abstract than his later pieces, perhaps more in an expressive style that might remind us of the likes of Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or August Macke. Everything in the scene can be easily identified, where as later pieces from his complex cubist approach, such as Violin and Candlestick and Violin and Palette, are far harder pieces to decipher. This particular painting is not one of the more famous in his career, but there maybe some who prefer it over some of his later pieces, such is its careful balance between the artist's mind and reality. A small green cushion is laid out, with the fruit on top. It is naturally placed, so as to look like the centre of a lunch spread, for example.
Tones of orange, yellow and green form most of this painting, with additional strokes of white paint being visible from a close distance. They were used for 'heightening' the piece, adding little touches of light to the sides of some of the bananas and also the front of the cushion. Small grey lines are used to form the different shapes, though not too bold as to appear abrupt. He may well have added these first, to lay out the design, before then going over them a second time after the solid colours had been added.
