Two green apples. 6"×8", oil on canvas panel, November 2011

I've often heard it said that a painter has to see "with their own eyes", as opposed to the eyes of other painters. While obviously true on some level, this feels wrong to me -- insofar as it defies the meaning, the raison d'etre of painting, or at least one of them. Our great predecessors shared with us their ways to see the world, so that we could refresh and enrich our own vision, clear it from the routine of the familiar and easily recognizable. If we are to do anything meaningful at all, we have to study and internalize their way of viewing things, rather than reject them in a futile quest for originality.

This little study of two apples was done in the aftermath of several months of my intense engagement with Picasso's work, and bears an unmistakeable stamp of his direct influence (as a recovering academic, I feel the need to add to this acknowledgement that all the mistakes are of course mine). There is no need to hide this influence, since they are also real apples on a real table, seen, in the end, with my own eyes.