Pears-as-Drawings

Returning to the subject of the pears of previous recentish posts, I noticed with aesthetic interest how, with the passage of time, their skins were developing a network of lines, mostly fine but some broader & more deeply scored - the pears in effect creating ‘drawings’ over their own surfaces, naturally, ‘automatically’ of their own accord in combination with environmental factors. Having recently watched Peter Greenaway’s film ‘The Pillow Book’, an aesthetically ravishing visual feast in itself, my attention was particularly heightened to this phenomenon, which seemed worthy of photographic record: below are presented 2 composite views of a series of sequential points around the circumference of the pears to illustrate the nature of these ‘drawings’.

By way of digression, the essential narrative of ‘The Pillow Book’ revolves around a young Japanese woman’s particular, idiosyncratic interest in calligraphy, which manifests itself in a somewhat fetishistic obsession with writing on the body, on human skin, an interest awakened by her calligrapher father’s habit of writing on her face and neck as a form of birthday greeting, and then developing into her adolescence and adulthood as a desire to have her body written upon and, subsequently, of doing the same to others, lovers, etc, herself, this latter being the device by which she contrives to achieve publication of her own previously rejected ‘pillow book’. It’s very sensual to see human skin, male and female, being used as the ground onto which text is applied, especially by gorgeous Japanese calligraphy brushes, and beautiful to appreciate the art itself. There’s a beauty too, I think, to the interplay of the combination of the delicate tracery of marks or more thickly 'carved' ones inscribed on the pears’ skins & a certain wonder in the process of their occurrence, a natural aesthetic ‘happening’.

(click on the images to access the full-sized versions)