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 paper to make this painting. What I didn’t know, though, is that, unlike the Arches paper on which I’ve painted just about everything elsse, Hahnemuhle paper has a marked right side and not-right side. Murphy’s law, I chose the not-right side.
The paint wouldn’t layer well, it never appeared to get as saturated as I’d wanted, as it was absorbed by the paper. Ugh. It was a slog to get through it. After about a year I forgot how awful the painting process was, so I could imagine investing in framing it.
A young woman came to my studio the next holiday season. I recognized her as the person who had bought two big prints many years earlier. She fell in love with this painting! She couldn’t stop looking at it.
I thought “no one is ever going to want this painting.” Yet, she wanted it very much! It is now hers and neither of us could be happier about that.
Sunset is the perfect name. There are the warm hues of the peppers, the end-of-the-day light hitting them horizontally, and by the time I painted it, my amazing Papa had seen his last sunset. He left us the November before I’d painted it.
I am ever grateful for all the ways his spirit endures in my life.
September 2021 – 22”x22” – Watercolor on paper.
More from the Vegetables Gallery
Global
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...
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...