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September 12, 2005
Oh...and fruit
Did I mention the fruit?
I paint fruit too.
Now you can’t just paint any fruit – well you can obviously, but I can’t. Most fruit is off the board. Apples, well I might stretch to a ripe Cox’s Orange Pippin,
but the plain green Granny Smith
is tedious in the extreme, Oranges are, well, just orange. Bananas are merely props for comedy routines. Grapes have far too many roundy bits. Strawberries: too clichéd. Ditto raspberries. In fact most berries are either too complicated, too fussy or too messy. When painting a fruit it has to remain in a reasonable way for a week at least. Which leaves lemons and pears. And even then you’ve got to find the RIGHT lemon. Most lemons, sadly, don’t look like lemons [see splashes].
So I was in Sainsbury’s going through the lemon boxes, holding up each lemon and narrowing my eyes appraising its lemonness, when my somewhat odd behaviour was brought to the attention of a supervisor.
“May I help you?”
“Oh, yes – I want a lemon.”
“I see”
“Er, yes, but not just any lemon.”
“So it would seem”
“Ah, well, you see, I’m an artist – a painter, and I want to paint a lemon, but it’s got to look like a lemon and…”
I noticed that the supervisor was dialling numbers on her number dialling thing, and before you could say “Jaffa” the brown-shirted security guards were dragging me away. As the heels of my shoes described swirling black rubber arcs on the floor of the supermarket I screamed “I AM AN ARTIST!”
I was a bit more careful when choosing the pear I am about to embark on.
It’s a peach don’t you think? Now peaches, you see, are too furry by far and should be left to the blendy attentions of the pastel artists.
Posted by john at September 12, 2005 07:52 PM