Raspberries
Sunday/September 28/2014 Filed in: Encaustic Painting
On a beautiful summer day when I was a child, I disappeared from my parents’ house. I was found later in the midst of the raspberry patch collecting berries for my Cheerios.
During my childhood my parents owned fifteen acres on the edge of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The property was split by a narrow raspberry patch that spanned most of the garden, and my father mowed down the center so that berries could be reached from the outside and the inside. The neighbors were invited to pick and we always had a surplus to pile on vanilla ice cream during humid Iowa evenings.
Now, a container of raspberries cost about three to four dollars from the grocery store.
When my father died September 1, 2014, my mother's garden was brimming with burgundy berries and we ate them by the handful.
This encaustic and pencil painting “Raspberries” is my first finished piece since moving to Denver and following my father’s death.
I read somewhere that all art is made for someone, which is not necessarily a large, nondescript audience but a particular person. From a marketing perspective this seems ludicrous, but to me that is part of the joy of art. Sometimes, I have made a painting hoping that I was creating something for God. Sometimes, I desired to make a particular person laugh or to give them joy. But, in the beginning, like most children, I made art for my family.
Underneath the surface of my art, like the raspberries, there is a story. It may have started for one person, but it branches out, blooms and blossoms, until there is enough that you can invite the neighbors.