STRANGE FRUIT - STILL LIFE
Exhibition June 10th - 29th 2012
Opening Reception June 10th 2-4pm
Gallery Hours 11-5pm
Monday - Sunday
JO BEALE GALLERY
10327 Peggys Cove Road
Glen Margaret
Nova Scotia
(902) 823 1960
Artist's Statement
Strange Fruit – Still Life
Some of the work in this show is from an on-going series called “Strange Fruit”. These are drawings of fruits and vegetables that diverge from the often homogenous (and kind of boring) offerings one finds at the grocery store. Funnily enough, the inspiration for this work started in a grocery store, where I discovered a dragonfruit. I’d never seen one before, and I thought it was such an amazing thing – a bright fuscia fruit with rubbery plates. What a strange fruit!
It was fall and the market was filled with produce. When I started to examine them, the fruits and vegetables all looked unusual in their own way. The leeks had lots of snakey roots and the field tomatoes were bulbous and creased. Some of the carrots had three legs. They all seemed wonderful and other-worldly.
I have been drawing still life for a long time. Usually I make the object very large to put it up close to the viewer for inspection. I don’t think we really look at things in day-to-day life. We assume that they look a certain way, but we don’t exult in how beautiful they are.
A cabbage is actually magnificent, a peach a perfect fuzzy sphere.