This understated still life painted on paper with oil paint, lead, pastel and pencil, is a good example of Laffón’s maturity as an artist and of her mastery as a painter. Here she reflects beauty at its purest through a number of objects that ask the beholder to reflect on the reality of the everyday. Its composition brings to mind the other still life by this artist in the BBVA Collection.
 
Her style has an intimate quality, materialised in the depiction of mundane themes in a lyrical and delicate manner, creating a poetic atmosphere through soft colours and shaded outlines that induces personal reflection.
 
Laffón started her training in Seville, her home city, following the express request of the painter Manuel González Santos (1875—1949). She furthered her studies in Europe and in Madrid, until definitively resettling in her native Seville. Her trajectory coincided with the emergence of several painting movements that questioned prior artistic values and favoured abstraction and non-objective painting. Always going against the grain, Laffón never relinquished figurative painting which she used to render landscapes, still lifes and portraits.
 
Drawing is the defining feature of Carmen Laffón’s art. Her style as a painter, rejected by abstract practitioners for its realism and by academicists for its modernism, is closer to Madrid Realism, of which Antonio López (1936) is probably the best known exponent. That said, she brought to it her own personal nuances, something that made her a benchmark for the so-called Seville Realism and a great influence on Andalusian painting.