Juicyfruit

Original Sold

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Many of my paintings in the past few years, have had stories that connect to something deep and meaningful. And this isn’t one! I was driving home from an overnight at a campout, my husband goes on every August. It was a sunny Sunday morning, and in my peripheral vision on the side of River Road, were these grapes. The somewhat orange color caught my eye. So I pulled over on the lumpy-grass shoulder and hopped out in my flip-flops, to take a bunch of pictures with my iPhone, while Bo waited for me in the car.

I’ve been wanting to paint another long narrow bunch of grapes in the same size and proportion as “Mid-Summer Zin”, and hadn’t found another image in the eight years since painting it – until this one. It was a Photoshop project before it was ready to be painted. In the original image, the whole lower left section was just dirt. And there weren’t enough canes to make the image interesting. This has me really appreciate the compositions that I just happened upon, in my early paintings before I knew how, or even thought of collaging images together to make a better painting.

The light on these grapes was higher in the sky, making the way it cast shadows different. There was a clear hard edge and a soft, graduated one – trickier to paint! In an attempt to bring in some blue, I ended up bringing in too much. So the cluster of the darkest grapes got painted twice. I’m becoming more comfortable taking whole sections of paintings up and re-doing them. There’s such freedom in doing this! The name just came to me – as playful and fun.

September – November 2015 – 30″x13.5″ – Watercolor on paper