art from the refrigerator

The sun came out a few times last week and really lifted my spirits. I started painting a yuzu fruit and imagined that the sun would taste like this (tart and bitter at the same time), but I added too much orange color for it to be a yuzu. Maybe it wanted to be a mikan. In any case, I felt like breaking the etegami standard of outlining the whole image in sumi ink. I wanted the fruit to have the feel of sunshine-- just glowing and spreading and infecting its surroundings with warmth.

Then today, as I was eating my daily apple and thinking about Snow White and about curses and temptations, I stumbled across this quote from a memo by Emily Dickinson.
 

japanese citron

A few weeks ago I received a box full of yuzu from a dear friend in Yokohama, far from the frigid, citrus-unfriendly climate of Hokkaido. She has a yuzu tree in her garden, and this is the second time she's shared this marvelous citrus fruit with me. Yuzu has uneven skin, with lots of irregular bumps and discolorations that make it the kind of subject etegami artists love to paint. What little juice the yuzu has is very tart, and used in cooking like vinegar or lemon juice. But it's the zest that we value the most. So WONderfully aromatic! I painted several etegami of this delightful gift fruit before I cut it all up, separating the juice from the rind, and freezing it for future use. The accompanying words are the Japanese version of the proverb I used in my previous post: Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed (Proverbs 11:25).