Alchemists’ work, turning tin and arsenic and vegetable juices into golden fruit painted with a kind of showy complication and variety that suggests there must have been competition among the painters of lemons.
Above is a quote from Mark Doty’s lovely little book, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, which is both an ode to the still life form and a meditation on ordinary objects and time.
So in the spirit of 17th Century Dutch painters, here is an image of my actual dish holding real lemons, and indeed a homage to the still life form and inviting contemplative meditation on the ordinary life.