Ephemeral art and the pursuit of chromatic expression: the Fruit Salad diptych

Still Life 1: Fruit Salad, a paler shade

The artist restricts his palette, generating a sense of calm from delicately merging near-white tints. Note the single eccentric (ex-centric), starkly white apple piece to the lower left, breaking and therefore somehow underlining the quasi-symmetry of the whole composition.

Still Life 2: Fruit Salad, a chromatic explosion

With the careful addition of new chromatic elements (note the red of strawberries crying out for attention, the dark tints of the blueberries recalling a sense of bleakness), the artist attains a full sweep of colour values.

Taken together, these two pieces make a clear statement of the artist’s – any artist’s – search for full expression, starting from the limited and subdued, and extending to the comprehensive and dramatic.

Of course, the art is ephemeral: you can eat it too.