Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
What the picture refuses to show is the view. Somewhere out there are a far shore, a horizon, a line where water ends and sky begins, and the fog has quietly repossessed them all. What survive are rumours: a smudge of trees, the pale ghost of a house, a yellow buoy hanging in the blankness like a full stop that has lost its sentence. It is the kind of morning when the world seems to have called in sick.
Which makes the foreground almost scandalous. On a table draped in black cloth at the water’s edge sits a nest of crumpled blue tissue paper, and in it five plums so dark they verge on black, their skins streaked with a frosty bloom, as though the fog had breathed on them too. The paper is the sly joke here: its creases make better waves than the actual water behind, which lies ironed flat. Someone has unwrapped a gift for nobody, facing a view that declined to attend. The plums don’t mind. They sit with the self-possession of things that know they are the only colour for miles.
Harvey lives in Rockport, Maine, and this is her territory in both senses: the water she sees daily, and the borderland where the domestic, fruit and paper and a laid table, is carried out to meet the elemental and holds its own. It is the sensibility of The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, work now exhibited and collected by museums across the United States. The title, it turns out, is only half an inventory: tissue wraps the plums. Fog wraps everything else.
What the picture refuses to show is the view. Somewhere out there are a far shore, a horizon, a line where water ends and sky begins, and the fog has quietly repossessed them all. What survive are rumours: a smudge of trees, the pale ghost of a house, a yellow buoy hanging in the blankness like a full stop that has lost its sentence. It is the kind of morning when the world seems to have called in sick.
Which makes the foreground almost scandalous. On a table draped in black cloth at the water’s edge sits a nest of crumpled blue tissue paper, and in it five plums so dark they verge on black, their skins streaked with a frosty bloom, as though the fog had breathed on them too. The paper is the sly joke here: its creases make better waves than the actual water behind, which lies ironed flat. Someone has unwrapped a gift for nobody, facing a view that declined to attend. The plums don’t mind. They sit with the self-possession of things that know they are the only colour for miles.
Harvey lives in Rockport, Maine, and this is her territory in both senses: the water she sees daily, and the borderland where the domestic, fruit and paper and a laid table, is carried out to meet the elemental and holds its own. It is the sensibility of The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, work now exhibited and collected by museums across the United States. The title, it turns out, is only half an inventory: tissue wraps the plums. Fog wraps everything else.