Citrus Juicer Inspiration
Above: Citrus juicer photographed upside down on needlepoint
January 25, 2019
January 25, 2019
Orange peels and
A glass citrus juicer.
It’s minus 12 degrees this morning.
Eight inches of snow
Lie crusted
Each side of the path
I’ve shoveled front door to garage
To venture out
Or stay at home?
Outside inspiration
turns inward
in January.
This past Christmas (2018), my present to myself was a set of water color paints, a medium I’d admired from afar, but never had the guts to try myself. A few days before Christmas, I’d turned 78 years old, so what exactly was I waiting for to try something new? Who knows? What follows is a record of what my subsequent inspirations.
How to begin? My bent is toward abstraction, but I definitely felt the need to keep things “simple” to begin with. What I’d always liked about watercolor was its feel of stained glass, like Tiffany glass on paper. So I said to myself “why not try painting stained glass?” This thought brought to mind a favorite stained glass website that I have bookmarked on my computer: Daniel Maher Stained Glass. Maher creates stunning windows from recycled dishes, bottles, and other glass objects with color and reflectivity. His “Housewares-Graveyard” windows are just wonderful!
Which brought me to the idea of a “painting in reverse.” I could create a “window of found objects” by drawing the outlines of an assortment of household objects on paper and then filling in the outlines as if they were a window of stained glass. The painting above was the result of this experiment.
By the next day, I was off and running with my idea. I arranged the morning’s breakfast orange peels on paper, and painted two versions of orange peels as stained glass.
Citrus in Blue
You can now bookmark my website on your phone with a new (and my first and only) favicon, a snippet from Citrus in Blue! Check it out on your phone!
Then came my inspiration about the orange juicer. I turned the juicer upside down on top of one of my needlepoint pillows (needlepoint is a long-standing hobby of mine; this particular pillow dates from 2009) and aimed my camera at the refracted light. The results: my “stained glass” citrus juicer is shown at the top of the page.
