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.
Chalky blue-gray, scuffed back to bare wood where feet have passed, the painted floorboards run on the diagonal, and against them the red of the cherries goes off like an alarm. Life, the old song insists, is just a bowl of cherries; the song has nothing to say about the floor. The white bowl sits directly on the boards, which is not where bowls live, and the fruit in it is wet, glazed, heaped in its own dark juice, more compote than harvest, as if sweetness were something that had already happened and was now being commemorated.
Then there are the stains. Plum-dark blotches trail across the boards below the bowl, ghosts of earlier spills, and one of them looks unnervingly like a footprint, as though someone had walked through the juice and simply kept going. So the still life arrives with a past. Something happened here (jam-making, a child, an accident of appetite) and the paint has kept the file open. The bowl itself, a faint fern printed inside its rim, sits amid the evidence like an innocent witness, its shadow thrown toward us by a window we never see.
Harvey, British-born and long settled in Rockport, Maine, has built a body of work (The Blue Notebook, Blue Violet) from exactly this register: domestic things raised to the pitch of omen. Her photographs are collected and exhibited widely across American museums, and in this archival pigment print the color does the storytelling, blue holding the room steady while red, gorgeous and unrepentant, refuses to behave.
Chalky blue-gray, scuffed back to bare wood where feet have passed, the painted floorboards run on the diagonal, and against them the red of the cherries goes off like an alarm. Life, the old song insists, is just a bowl of cherries; the song has nothing to say about the floor. The white bowl sits directly on the boards, which is not where bowls live, and the fruit in it is wet, glazed, heaped in its own dark juice, more compote than harvest, as if sweetness were something that had already happened and was now being commemorated.
Then there are the stains. Plum-dark blotches trail across the boards below the bowl, ghosts of earlier spills, and one of them looks unnervingly like a footprint, as though someone had walked through the juice and simply kept going. So the still life arrives with a past. Something happened here (jam-making, a child, an accident of appetite) and the paint has kept the file open. The bowl itself, a faint fern printed inside its rim, sits amid the evidence like an innocent witness, its shadow thrown toward us by a window we never see.
Harvey, British-born and long settled in Rockport, Maine, has built a body of work (The Blue Notebook, Blue Violet) from exactly this register: domestic things raised to the pitch of omen. Her photographs are collected and exhibited widely across American museums, and in this archival pigment print the color does the storytelling, blue holding the room steady while red, gorgeous and unrepentant, refuses to behave.