Mike Mars
I’m a Yorkshire artist who seeks to capture our widest spaces, our smallest pleasures, and our finest moments.
Let’s start small, then expand.
Rather than ‘still lifes’, I’m calling these watercolours ‘Fruit Portraits’: I studied them with the same attention and love that I might study a face.
I wanted to contain each fruit in the same-sized circle (a 28cm ceramic table-mat served its purpose here) to create a bold, uniform design and to suggest their similar importance. All fruit are created equal after all.
But no two things are alike. Each piece of fruit is different, just as each moment of each fruit is different (that ageing peach wouldn’t have lasted another day — I ate it while the paint was still wet). Within those circles, I wanted to scrutinise the individuality of each subject: their particularities of colours and textures, their ripe rotundity, the beauty of their imperfections, warts and all — the scars and scratches, hairs and wrinkles. I told you they were portraits!*.
* Come to think of it, they might be veiled self-portraits…
