Year's End: Last Radishes of 2011, paint, colors, radishes

Radishes on Blue Dinner Plate, © Sukie Curtis, 2011, oil on canvas

The same bunch of radishes lasted me through several paintings and a few of my classes at Artascope Studios in South Portland, Maine. I haven't checked recently, but I have a hunch they are still occupying some space at the back of the refrigerator, much faded in color and certainly more puckery than smooth-skinned.

Though I never ate any of these radishes, I believe I got good mileage out of them all the same. Much more than mileage, really.

Inspiration. Delight. Amazement. Humor (those funny root tails!). Instruction in color, shape, invention, and the astonishing life-ward orientation of organic things.

I'm not ready to swear off radishes-as-muses all the way until next summer when there will again be locally grown ones at the farmers markets. But for a while, other colorful and shapely creatures may join the dance--clementines, pears, apples, bananas, maybe even pomegranates!