When my friend Stephanie Bauman lived on Kauai, she dug in the rich volcanic earth to put in a veggie garden on the land up above the house. She grew these eggplants – then we ate them as eggplant parmigiana! So perfect, they reflected all the green growing around them like a mirror.
Then one summer I led a Saturday workshop on painting shiny things. Looking through my images looking for something shiny in my world of flowers, fruits and other edibles, this one jumped out.
It’s fun to see what we can create with shape and shade and color to fool our eyes and brains! As I was painting this one, I consoled myself as I struggled by realizing that this might be the most challenging thing I’d ever painted. Seventy something big paintings in, and I felt like I was still taming a wild animal in getting the colors to merge and have smooth edges, while staying clear and distinct.
These are globe eggplants. This along with the fact that we can never be reminded enough that we all live on this one blue-green sphere flying through space together, the name popped out.
June 2016 – 22″x22″ – Watercolor on paper
More from the Vegetables Gallery
Sunset
These peppers really did grow in these yummy colors! My dad grew them in his prolific summer vegetable garden. A painting of them would be nice to accompany Ripe - the painting I did of his beautiful tomatoes - a decade earlier. I tried a new brand of watercolor...
Sungold
It was a bright Saturday morning early in tomato season at Mike and Julie's garden in San Anselmo. This was just such a nice arrangement of the little tomatoes and their star-shaped sepals. And then - of course - the light! I started this painting to demonstrate at a...
Squash Blossom and Bee
This painting came from an image I've been living with for a while. This is a squash blossom (maybe zucchini) from the vegetable garden growing in the front (!) yard next door to my friend Karen's vacation place in Nevada City. It's such a sweet town that time seems...
Beneath an Olive Tree
My father planted this tree in our family yard in the early 70's - it is now quite a tree. This image came from a November day when my niece, Amanda and I spent some time taking photos in my parents' garden. It was gently warm and the light was soft. The blue-black of...
Ripe!
My dad has planted a vegetable garden every summer of my life, until the end of his. There were organic gardening magazines lying around the house, when the word "organic" was still uncommon. The house we moved to when I was a year and a half old was on a quarter acre...