Cure

Every winter, when one of us had a sore throat, my father made them a special tea: lemon, ginger, and honey poured over with hot water.

We make it ourselves from time to time, exactly the same way, ingredient for ingredient. It never tastes quite right. Something about it only works in his hands. His Always Tastes Different.

This lemon is for that. For the recipe nobody can replicate, no matter how closely we follow it.

The making of this painting was pure joy. The idea was fresh, and I loved composing it and trying new things, figuring out what worked and what didn’t, with nothing at stake yet.

I called this series Mediterranean for a long time before I understood why.

It’s not about a coastline. It’s about the things that grow here, the things we share, the small rituals that exist all along this sea, different languages, same gestures. Someone always saving you the sweet piece. Someone always showing up with fruit from their own tree.

Each painting in this series started as something else entirely — a fruit, a vegetable, an everyday thing. But every one of them turned out to be about a person. A parent’s hands. A neighbor’s generosity. A summer ritual repeated so many times it became part of who I am.

These aren’t paintings of food.

They’re small portraits of love, told the only way my family ever really told it, through what ended up on the table.

This is where the series begins. Ten paintings, ten memories, all of them still warm.

Each piece in this series is mixed media and oil; the first layers built with collage, stencils, acrylics and other dry media, then refined and finished in oil. I call this style abstract realism: only the main subject is painted with realistic detail, while everything around it stays loose, textured, abstracted.