9pm news

Pomegranates season has a ritual on its own.. Around the dinner table and while watching the 9pm news, we’d be opening the fruits and making sure each one got a piece.

Someone always made sure everyone got a sweet seed, not just a sour one. I don’t know who started that rule. I just know nobody ever broke it.

This one was pure pleasure to paint. I loved the color palette so much I didn’t want it to end.

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.