My Art show of oil paintings and essays – titled “Vegetable Portraits…explorations of land and produce” will be on view at the Meekins Library in Williamsburg, MA for this month of November. The opening is Saturday, November 5th at the library from 1pm – 3pm.
Here’s an excerpt from an Essay about the project….
I love food. My family is the kind of family that plans its meals in the midst of the ones that they are still eating. Living here in the Pioneer Valley, there is amazing, fresh food grown with love and care. The food culture here not only has implications of healthy eating and living, it shows a deep consciousness of the importance of regional food systems, resilient, small-scale production, and the critical nature of regional economic development. While inherently enjoyable, eating Hadley asparagus can be seen as a political act that embraces the local, the small, and the regional in the face of the industrial, and the pervasive global agribusiness. My paintings reflect the magic of where we live and the power each of us has to choose the smaller, more resilient local economy.
In addition to the paintings,essays reflect the moment of each painting, the nature of the subject or the thoughts that the subject inspired within me. The large canvases I have done further explore the color, space and compositional relationships initiated in the smaller pieces.
The depiction of each vegetable represents an iconic time of the calendar year (asparagus season, strawberry season, tomato time, etc.), in essence, a calendar of the senses and of anticipation. To me, fresh, crunchy fiddlehead ferns and the soft nutty flavor of young nettles have more to do with May than any store-bought calendar image may be able to represent. The Vegetable Portraits project represents my relationships with these farms, these vegetables as well as the way I choose to live my life
