Day 6 – A Watercolorist’s Journal
I’m going to tell you the story of a lemon. At first glance, there is nothing too special about this lemon. It’s sitting on its long side, with another lemon, sliced, propped up against it. And there is a little leaf sticking out, as if the thing’s just been plucked from a tree in Sorrento. But then, if you look closely, you see the lemon’s a little “off.” The color is wrong, firstly–too brown–and, secondly, the shape–sunken and pointed where it should be round and firm. This lemon was left on the counter in the sun from the window, or it rolled beneath the refrigerator and was forgotten for a week or two. If you found it, you would toss it in the compost bin, not prop it up on a linen tablecloth and paint it.
And even if you decided that this tough old rhino-hided lemon carcass was a worthy subject of art–if you were one of those old Renaissance painters, say, with a penchant for pomegranates and figs, ripe to bursting, strewn amid peony blossoms expanding like little pink and white universes, shedding their heavy bruised petals like the damp pages of books–if such things appealed to you, then this lemon would be just the thing to complete your pornographic display of flyspecked decadent decay.
But even supposing this were the case, you would not paint it in this way. The sliced lemon, lacking any sort of depth, the shaded rind describing no three-dimensional object, but a warped and dented plane slipping mischievously between the second and third dimensions. And the shadow! Suspended beneath the lemon and leaf like Spanish moss from a live oak, telling us nothing about any real or imagined surface a piece of fruit might in fact be set upon.
It didn’t have to be this way. There was hope, in the beginning: a fairly proportioned pencil sketch, a wash of sunny yellow. And then, over the course of 30 minutes or so, you proceeded to work that lemon to death. Remember when you said about not trying to “fix” things? You tried to fix everything! And it didn’t work. Because of course it didn’t. Hmmpf. Let this lemon be a lesson to you.