The Orange

When I was in Florida in the winter of 2000, the people I was staying with had on their dining room table an orange in a ceramic bowl, a bowl that _appeared to have been made by coiling the clay into shape rather than turning it on a wheel. It seemed to me a very artistic thing, that particular orange placed just so in that particular bowl, and we had a good time talking about it and playing around with it.

One morning I came in and noticed the orange had been moved in the bowl.

"Who moved the orange?!" said I.

The orange was quickly put back into its original artistic position.

Another day, I came in from driving around the area to find that someone had tossed trash into the bowl. It was a small piece of trash — maybe a gum wrapper — but still, that one bit of trash had destroyed the artful composition!

"Who put that trash into the bowl?!" said I.

The trash was forthwith removed from the bowl, and the orange was repositioned.

Yet another day, I came in from my local wanderings to find that the orange was gone. In its place was a note: "I O U one orange — for the baby's lunch"! Sure enough, the next time my hosts went grocery shopping, they bought a whole bag of oranges and refilled the bowl.

Early on in my visit, I took some photos of The Orange (the original orange), reclining curvaciously in its ceramic haven. Once I returned home, I tried painting The Orange in its bowl, using the photos as a reference. But I never could get any of the paintings to turn out the way I wanted them to.

Then after a while, The Orange began to pop up here and there — never as an orange fruit in a ceramic bowl, but almost always as a sun. I realize some of those oranges might not look like oranges to anyone else. But they are oranges. Or, at least, reflections of an orange ....

In 2005, I finally succeeded in painting The Orange in The Bowl for those same people -- five times in a single work -- without initially realizing that I'd managed it:

06 Aug 05