more colorful produce

Hokkaido has entered the dormant season where the once-colorful leaves have crumbled to brown dust and snow will soon cover all traces of ground vegetation and even the mis-matched colors of our house roofs and automobiles.

This is when I really start appreciating the colors of our fruits and vegetables. Sure, we have beautiful produce during our brief summers, but I guess I don't appreciate their colors as much as they deserve, because, outside, the leaves on the trees are all shades of green, flowers bloom like pieces of the rainbow, and butterflies flit like floating flower petals.

In the setting of a monochromatic winter, purple-skinned sweet potatoes and persimmons the color of the sun really brighten my world. I picked out a couple samples from my illustrated recipes as evidence.

illustration friday (double)

I love drawing persimmons at any stage: Seeds, flowers, unripe fruit, ripe fruit, over-ripe fruit, sliced, quartered, dried and wrinkled, on the branch, on the ground, tied to drying ropes and hanging from the eaves, piled in a bowl, bug-eaten... and so on. For this week's IF topic, I present you with an etegami of two nearly identical persimmons that ripened on the branch late last fall/early winter as I watched and marveled. The words say: In the Fullness of Time.

persimmons advise patience

How I love Autumn in Hokkaido! I love the sharpness in the air, the smells on the breeze, the colors on the trees, and the sardine-shaped clouds in a deep blue sky. I find myself looking upwards a lot. My joy is tinged with the bittersweet awareness of Winter lurking around the next corner, but that makes it all the more precious to me.

I draw persimmons every fall. I used to wait till they were ripe, and paint them in all their persimmon-orange glory. Later, I became intrigued by the green and yellow stages leading up to their fully-mature state. Then, last year, I became fascinated with dried persimmons, and I struggled to express the many sugar-dusted wrinkles on shrunken fruit that had faded to a salmon-pink. Maybe this year I'll focus on sliced fresh persimmons, with their flat black seeds and sticky juices. Ahh, persimmons!

The etegami I've posted here is of unripe persimmons on the branch. The greenish fruit is tinged with yellow, which I emphasized by gluing lacy yellow tissue paper (see earlier post on chigiri-e) over the green orbs. The accompanying words are an old Japanese proverb: Momo Kuri San-nen, Kaki Hachi-nen (Three years for Peach or Chestnut- Eight years for Persimmon) It is a reference to how long it takes for these trees to produce fruit. In other words: don't get upset if your efforts don't bear fruit right away. These things take time. The proverb advises patience.