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 “Fuzzy Background” workshop. I’ll never forget the day – I got frazzled and used my teeth to open a tube of paint and ended up squirting some in my mouth, while six students – who I didn’t know well – watched. Ee-gads!
It took me a year to want to pick the painting back up again. There is a wonderful sense of satisfaction in finishing another painting that has been kicking around my studio like “that old thing” – a resurrection of sorts.
I was at Dostal Studios to order the frame for it. Matt, the designer, said they looked like the Sun Gold variety of orange cherry tomatoes. I’m not sure there’s a way to know if this is the variety, or if Mike would even remember. No matter – when Matt said it, I heard the “ding, ding, ding” – he gave me the name: Sungold.
August 2015 – 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...
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...
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...