This painting came from an image I’ve been living with for a while. This is a squash blossom (maybe zucchini) from the vegetable garden growing in the front (!) yard next door to my friend Karen’s vacation place in Nevada City. It’s such a sweet town that time seems to have left largely alone.
This is the second painting that has come of a summer weekend that Vicki and I stayed with Karen – the first is “Blueberry Symphony.” I loved painting the bee in “Honey Bee and Rugosa Roses” and have been longing for another image that would be worth making into a painting. This one is that. The bee is headed into the center of the blossom – all those sunlit specks of pollen!
I grew up eating squash blossoms. Mrs. Bianchi, who lived across the street from us on Pine Avenue in Woodacre made them for us. She simply dipped them in beaten egg, fried them in olive oil until they were golden brown and seasoned them with salt. They are so pure eaten this way. The have the taste of the zucchini they share the plant with, but are just so delicate. This painting fully qualifies to be in the vegetable gallery here!
April 2012 – 22″x22″ – Watercolor on paper
More from the Vegetables Gallery
Sunset
These peppers really did grow in these yummy colors! My dad grew them in his prolific summer vegetable garden. A painting of them would be nice to accompany Ripe - the painting I did of his beautiful tomatoes - a decade earlier. I tried a new brand of watercolor...
Global
When my friend Stephanie Bauman lived on Kauai, she dug in the rich volcanic earth to put in a veggie garden on the land up above the house. She grew these eggplants – then we ate them as eggplant parmigiana! So perfect, they reflected all the green growing around...
Sungold
It was a bright Saturday morning early in tomato season at Mike and Julie's garden in San Anselmo. This was just such a nice arrangement of the little tomatoes and their star-shaped sepals. And then - of course - the light! I started this painting to demonstrate at a...
Beneath an Olive Tree
My father planted this tree in our family yard in the early 70's - it is now quite a tree. This image came from a November day when my niece, Amanda and I spent some time taking photos in my parents' garden. It was gently warm and the light was soft. The blue-black of...
Ripe!
My dad has planted a vegetable garden every summer of my life, until the end of his. There were organic gardening magazines lying around the house, when the word "organic" was still uncommon. The house we moved to when I was a year and a half old was on a quarter acre...