harvest display

When I got this month's New Yorker from my mailbox yesterday, I was startled and happy to see Wayne Thiebaud on the cover. The tell-tale signs were all there: the food, the little halos around the food, the sometimes garish colors.

I have been thinking about food the last few weeks, we are talking about food in class, ala my on-going preoccupation with Michael Pollan. This particular Thiebaud echoes something I think about when I go to the grocery store, especially here in New York. At my neighborhood market right now, there are pumpkins and bubbly squash spilling onto the sidewalks, autumn apples in ten varieties, and, oddly, an overabundance of raspberries...? which are on special.

The "Harvest Display" in our modern world is a funny thing--not just displaying our harvest, but everyone else's, including South America's, which is where the November bumper crop of raspberries comes from. Next to Theibaud's pumpkin lies a summer treat--watermelon--and below are boxes of goods from Chile, Australia, Mexico. On the bottom shelves is that ubiquitous fruit that still seems a little out of place in New York in the winter--bananas.

All of this aside, though, the thing I liked best about Thiebaud's cover was the idea that he might have just painted it, that it might be new. If I feel uninspired or tired, I picture old Thiebaud next to his easel, stooped and squinting, still delighted by the world and churning out work.