Description
These grapes that I’ve painted since 2007 are part of a tiny vineyard (29 plants) on a red-dirt hillside in my brother Mike’s backyard in San Anselmo where he and his wife Julie created a wonderful idyll – an outdoor table and chairs in a corner surrounded by thick cannas and under a bright red umbrell and the canopy of a walnut tree. They had tomatoes and lots of other vegetables growing, roses growing on the fence, dahlias, sunflowers and stone-paved steps going up into the grapes. In a small house and small yard, they created a beautiful, life-filled environment.
Last year Mike started a demanding job for Apple in Cupertino prompting them to move to the city and sell their little house. It’s now someone else’s home and I can’t just pop over with my camera to take photos of the grapes anymore. I need to have a connection to my painting subjects. If I’m to keep painting grapes, some new source will have to appear in my life!
I love making square paintings. Since painting “Persimmon Rain” in 2006, it’s been a format I’ve come back to again and again and is now part of what I do. All the paintings I’ve done of Mike’s zinfandel grapes have been vertical, following the orientation of how grapes grow. I wanted the challenge of another format. I couldn’t find one that was horizontal, but this square image worked. It’s also distinct from the other paintings as it places the grapes and vines more in their environment – a bit of the hills to the south in the distance, a rose bush and even some bare dirt in the lower yard behind the clusters of fruit.
I find myself saying all the time that I “find my way through” every painting. Even though I’m working from a photo and am fairly faithful to the colors, I really never know how they will end up. I used a lot of cobalt blue in this one and it gave the grapes a really cold, almost frosty look. I wanted them warmer, so I layered over them a wash of new gamboge (yellow orange). The colors ended up even more bright and vibrant than I’d expected.
I’ve been told lately there is a more luminous quality emerging in my paintings – I think I see it here. I was at Light Rain, getting it captured for giclee prints and talking to my friend Julia about what I might name it. Wanting to keep it simple, I thought I might call it simply “Zin” but then was telling her how this painting depicts for me the oasis that Mike and Julie created. It’s both, a Zin…oasis. And I’m so grateful for all the hard work my brother put into this patch of land – the source of inspiration for these paintings that so many people have loved. Thank you, Mike!
September 2013
