Tomatoes on the Vine, Impasto Painting on Canvas, Signed Michael, 2006

The Painting

Tomato vines climbing a trellis, seen close up and filling the whole canvas. Ripe fruit hangs in clusters of red and orange, drawn with a loaded brush and finished with a single curling stroke for each calyx. The leaves are built in broad slabs of green that run from near black in the shadows to an acid yellow green where the light hits, and a band of blue sky shows through at the top.

The paint is laid on thick. Ridges stand up off the surface and hold their peaks, and the white highlight strokes were dragged over color that had not yet set, so they pick up what is underneath instead of covering it. The trellis is the structure that holds the picture together: long single strokes laid down in a grid, some brown, some pale green, some pure white, crossing the whole composition and giving the loose handling something rigid to work against.

Signed at the lower left in white, Michael, with the year beneath it. The canvas is a commercial pre stretched cotton, stapled on the sides in the gallery manner, and the stretcher bar is ink stamped MADE IN ITALY. It is framed in a dark stained wood molding with a narrow gilt lip at the opening.

History & Provenance

The signature and the date are the documentation here. The painter signed a first name only, so the hand is not identified and no body of work can be attached to it. What the canvas does establish on its own is the year, 2006, written in the artist's own paint at the time the picture was finished, and the materials agree with it. A pre stretched Italian cotton canvas of this type was ordinary art supply stock in the United States through those years, and the paint film shows none of the age a much older picture would.

The reverse carries the label of Firefly Framing Studio, 291 School Street, Suite 6, Willits, California, with a telephone number. Willits sits in Mendocino County in inland northern California, redwood and small farm country north of the wine region. The painting was taken to a custom shop rather than a chain, fitted into a frame chosen for it, and hung on D ring hangers with braided wire, which is what someone does with a picture they intend to keep.

The subject supports that reading. The fruit is painted at several stages at once, some still green, some half turned, some fully ripe, and the leaves curl and cup the way tomato leaves actually do rather than the way a decorator pattern would draw them. That accuracy comes from looking at a real plant on a real trellis, which places this with the long tradition of painters who worked their own gardens and found enough in them.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Red against green is the hardest pairing in a room to get right and the easiest one to enjoy when it is right. Here it arrives already resolved, because the greens carry so much blue and black that the fruit reads as warmth rather than noise. Hang it in a kitchen, a breakfast room or a dining room and it will set the palette for everything else on the wall.

The grid of the trellis is what makes it work at a distance. Loose paintings often dissolve when you step back; this one holds, because the structure underneath is ruled and straight. It reads clearly from across a room and rewards standing close, which is not a combination you get often at this scale.

It is also a painting about food, made by someone who grew the food. That is a specific and increasingly scarce kind of picture, and it belongs in rooms where people cook and eat rather than in a hallway.