These grapes grew in 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 lovely idyll – table and chairs under a bright red umbrella and the canopy of a walnut tree. They had tomatoes amid other vegetables, roses along the fence, dahlias, sunflowers and stone-paved steps going into the grapes. In a small neighborhood yard, they created a lush world, full of life.
I love making square paintings. It’s a format I come back to again and again, and a first for paintings of Mike’s grapes. This composition is also distinct from my other grape paintings, as it places the grapes and vines in their environment – a bit of the hills in the distance, a rose bush, and even some bare dirt behind the clusters of fruit.
In talking to my friend Julia about what I might name it, a new word was coined. I thought I might call it simply “Zin” but I wished for the name to depict the oasis that Mike and Julie created. It’s both – a Zin… and an oasis.
I’m 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.
September 2013 – 29″x29″ – Watercolor on paper
More Vineyards
AmaZin
The spirit of this painting has been patient and faithful. The grapes are Zinfandel, from my friend Sue's ranch in Cloverdale. After Zintopia, it's my second painting from there. The way this patch of grapes is postioned on the hill, the sunlight shows off their...
Napa
It was late autumn, the day I drove home after a lunch at Greystone in St. Helena. On the side of Highway 29, the main route through the Napa Valley, lies vinyard after vinyard. The afternoon sun was low in the sky and as it shone through the reds and yellows of the...
Sonoma
The path to a painting is rarely direct—especially this one. It began with a photo I took in early fall 2008, just a year after I started showing my art. I was driving back from an errand at the North Bay Gallery in Sonoma when I spotted white grapes along Highway 12....
Zintopia
Zinfandel grapes from a new vineyard! When my brother Mike and his wife Julie sold their house I lost my source of Zinfandel grapes to paint. Where I was going to find them when I could no longer pop by to see my brother and sister-in-law. I forgot that we live in...
Juicyfruit
On a sunny Sunday morning, driving home from an overnight at a campout my husband goes on every August, in my peripheral vision on the side of River Road, were these grapes. Their orange color stood out - orange grapes? I pulled over on the lumpy-grass shoulder and...
Rest
I was up in the wine country - the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma late in the year. My sweetie suggested I check out the Christmas tree farm on Moon Mountain. Driving back down the road I saw along the way – someone’s home, not a big vineyard – grapes near the fence....
Summer Zinfandel
There's nothing like a deadline to light a fire under my butt. I really wanted to submit a painting to the California State Fair Art of Wine exhibit the summer of 2011. A painting of mine had been accepted in that category the previous three years in a row and I...
Late Summer Zin
Late in the summer of 2009 I visited Mike's yard to see what his zinfandel grapes were like when they were nearly ripe. BJ and I climbed all over his hill in the evening light, having to climb under the netting draped over them - more sugar in the grapes and the birds...
Zin of Many Colors
Here's my first attempt to go big. It is my second painting of my brother Mike's zinfandel grapes . Mid-Summer Zin, my first, was a hard act to follow. At the time I painted this, it was a huge stretch And I worked on it fiercely to get it done in time to be framed...
Mid-Summer Zin
My brother, Mike and his wife, Julie had a small hillside backyard in San Anselmo, terraced with stone and covered with rows of Zinfandel vines. Each autumn, he made the grapes into wine with our brother Matt, a winemaker. I had been waiting and wanting to paint...