Marmalade

There was a time in my childhood when my mother made orange marmalade and the whole house smelled like citrus and sugar for days.

We now buy sugar free jams sometimes, or avoid white sugar altogether.. so she doesn’t make marmalades anymore, and we don’t buy that many oranges anyway.. But the smell and the taste are still exactly where I left them.

In this painting the oranges themselves turned out stunning, I loved their leaves in particular.. but the bag drove me a little mad. Every color combination I tried came out muddy or unconvincing. It’s funny how the part that gave me the most trouble isn’t even the part people remember.

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.