Northern – Roadside figs up north

The best figs I’ve ever had came from a vendor by the side of the road heading north.. They display them in buckets.. It became a ritual.. Every summer, I have to had figs from the north, to this day…

I don’t know if they were actually the best figs in the country, but they are definitely the best for me.. The ones tied to a feeling I always remember every time I see a fig bucket on the side of a road. A mix of nostalgia and childhood carefree joy.

I enjoyed painting this one… And it’s one of my favorites in the collection.
It was in October.. Cold autumn days in my old studio, a podcast playing, a cup of tea going cold beside me. I painted it in a calm, nostalgic headspace, and that feeling is still in it.

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.