Frutería

Some time in the mid 1970s I took an adult education class at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. I had graduated from there several years previously but had never taken life drawing. (My time at MassArt was during a period of national campus turmoil, some of which included student-driven curricular revisions, not all of which were well thought through: traditional art training modes, like life drawing, were deemed “irrelevant”).

Our teacher in this later life drawing class was David Sipress; he had us drawing fruit as a way of practicing during the week, when you might not have access to a human model. One of our classmates, I never learned her name, brought in a pencil drawing of pears that changed my life. To my amazement I began drawing and painting fruit, an enterprise sure to win sneers at the time, and I've never really stopped (or cared about the sneers.) These paintings span the past three decades; be sure to check the dimensions: they vary widely in size.