Still life

This is "the one", my first love. While making this painting, in my intro to painting class in college, I fell hard for the delicious process of putting paint and brush to canvas.

My professor had set up a huge still life of fabrics and fruits in the middle of our painting classroom, and I was immediately drawn to the relationship between the gourd and the pear. When I began to paint them everything else fell away around me, and it was just me and my painting. The calm that descended upon my mind as I painted was a sensation that I could not get enough of, I came at all hours to the studio to work on this painting. The colors and the texture of the paint transfixed me, but the most amazing thing to me was the magic of it...the way I could squeeze a blob of paint from a tube onto my palette and through just using my brush to smear it onto a canvas I could create anything that I wanted. Here, so many years later, the satisfaction that I felt as I painted the orange skin of the gourd is still palpable to me, and I still can't get enough of painting.

Today my still life adorns one of the nooks in my parent's lovely living room. Whenever I am there I take some time for a little visit, sometimes just a glance, sometimes a longer gaze or an up-close study. This still life will always be one of my most precious paintings...serving as a reminder of the discovery of first love.