Alt. Pear Photos

I’ve long been interested in the aesthetic, formal properties of pears as subjects for visual exploration and, as a result, they’ve featured in countless drawings and paintings over a number of years: some of these, indeed, may be found on my website (now defunct), in both the drawings and paintings galleries.

Recently attracted to a new discovery on the pear scene, named ‘Ya’ or known as snow pears and apparently from China, in a local greengrocers, I was inspired to invest in a few for modelling purposes, keen again to explore the possibilities offered by the new camera.

The pears themselves have beautiful cream, pale golden coloured skins, and I wished I had made their acquaintance years ago when making a long series of still life paintings on/in textured white grounds/spaces: their quiet tonal subtleties would have complemented each other most harmoniously. However, upon returning home, I realised just how visually arresting and intriguing they appeared as bought - wrapped in a layer of paper and then what appear like little thermal jackets for want of a more appropriate description (string vests?!). The fact that both the paper and outer protective layer happen to be white made them all the more attractive to me for the visual purposes to which I intended to put the pears, even more so given the slight translucency of the paper and wonderful texture of the ‘jackets’, as both the manifest working in a process of layering, offering hints as to the nature and accumulation of those below the surface, and with Braque-like textured, ‘tactile spaces’ (in the form of paint and collaged elements) have been significant aspects of my painting practice and concerns since undergraduate times.

Anyway, thus far, since Saturday – whilst awaiting the availability of sufficient light in which to adequately photograph (within the depths of January in the UK, after all), trying to avoid the use of flash - I’ve only managed to produce images of the pears still clothed in their wrappings. Some were taken in an even light against a white ground and others in a brief sunlit interlude, again against white but consequently bathed in a lovely golden glow and also highlit in a manner which emphasizes the pears’ form. I must admit to being most inspired by the textured surfaces, which invest the pears with a certain sense of strangeness and difference, whilst not detracting from their essential formal qualities as pears-in-themselves.