An Apple A Day
The passing of time is measured in numerous ways. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, eons. Time measured with clocks, calendars, seasons, benchmarks, all ways of recording and keeping track of passing moments. This body of work chronicles a year in the form of images, one painting to mark each day.
The 8x8 panels represent three-hundred and sixty-five different thoughts about apples. Variety is not only in the apple’s color, size or degree of freshness, but is considered in formalistic, historic, popular and symbolic terms.
In how many ways can one thing be contemplated and represented? How long is a year of apples? How much space does a year of painting one thing occupy, both physically and mentally? How will these images relate to one another? And how should this chronicle of time be seen?
These are all questions that evolved as this project unfolded but the first apple was a means of striving to solve a problem. I had very little energy to work on my more involved pieces but felt that focusing for a short period each day on a complete painting would be therapeutic.
I chose the apple for my first composition because of its simplicity and availability. Completing a work in less than an hour and considering it a study was the goal. It was an intuitive and practical decision to continue painting the apple, but after several days I found that my mind had taken off on the idea and I would need to continue for quite some time to exhaust it. In mid September I made the decision to continue painting one apple a day for a year.
