Cherry
Cherry (1986) by Brian Fielding
Pray the Tate grant my requests, one was to view this, the other private.
First Look
I retained my practice of withholding context and lightly leaned on the TERRA Foundation’s Reading Anchors 2 & 3 to structure my first look. This begins by asking myself “What’s the main idea?” to which three facets of an answer emerged.
This Painting Is About
This is a painting about fruit, bowls and tables. This is gleaned from seeing two apples, a wedge of citrus parsed as blood orange, some implied pears and a fruit stem emerging a vase, as well as the title. This is a painting about interior life, because tables and fruit bowls are found inside a house. This is not just about fruit, bowls and tables because the pears in the bowl look like a skull, one you’d find in a Day of the Dead context. The classic combination of fruit and skulls happens in Vanitas, a genre of Memento Mori, but this doesn’t look depressing.
This is a painting about quotidian objects arranged as though for presentation, but without a clear look at any of the things painted.
This is a painting about hunger and comfort. There is fruit, vessels and a jelly in the top left corner behind the wedge. One vessel is filled with skeletal pears, the other is empty, another only has a stem emerging. These remind me of states of satiety, being full or not. There is no feeling of lack or being hungry, especially because the blue leaves on the apples are unnatural for food – just the presence of the concept of hunger. The jelly shape is gelatinous and the colors remind me of Andy Warhol’s giclee prints, which always look somewhat juicy. There is a side-table which implies consideration for comfort inside a home, possession of which itself implies comfort.
Next, TERRA invites consideration of “What title would you give this artwork, and why?” This beautiful question prompted most of my insights, and is a wonderful framework for breaking past intentional fallacy.
Alternative Titles
‘Vanitas in the 90s’
This title came to me independent of the context, which made me cry in incredulity and love for the work after finding out that Brian Fielding knew of his terminal illness when painting this.
Finality and Transcience
Vanitas is a symbolism-laden genre of painting, typically including collections of objects signifying the passage of time, transience on earth. It’s a genre of Memento Mori reminding the viewer of death’s inevitability, sometimes with religious overtones.
Vanitas was evoked from the particular combination of fruit and skull. Fruit of course ripens, is cyclical, rots, is ephemeral. Fruit can rot before you have the chance to eat it, which can be a metaphor for wanting to cling to life. Fruit also becomes trash and waste through the eating of it, kind of how consumption alone makes waste without creation. Vanitas typically evokes the passage of time by featuring fruit in a specific state of ripeness, but this painting seems to freeze time and talk only of a moment, the present and most enduring one.
Beauty and Vanity
This vanitas was situated in the 1990s in my imagination primarily because of the colors. Vanitas specifically instead of Memento Mori, because I thought of vanity in seeing the cherry red, the symbolism of cherries, the fact that red is tightly entwined with lipstick and beauty for me. The cherries here read as apples to me, which are the fruit of original sin, the fruit of heaven, the object in ‘apple of my eye’.
Color
The hot, blue-pink-cerise red screams. It refuses to be ignored. The red in combination with black reminds me of Serge Lutens for Shiseido, of lipstick, of Chinese restaurant interiors with red curtains.
The ‘empty vase’ drawn from partial splodged line evokes Japanese lunchboxes, an example of which I found auctioned on Sotheby’s from the collection of Freddie Mercury.
The red in combination with pink feels very modern, of course Glossier’s early 2016 era ads come to mind (I preferred the suggested rebrand). Pink feels future-facing to me, partially as it’s my husband’s favorite color and he’s consistently several hundred steps ahead of everyone else in his thinking.
The 90s were evoked as brown and red were big lipstick colors in the 90s, and the intense saturation reminded me of movies like American Beauty, American Psycho, Pretty Woman (red on all their posters). The red-yellow-blue evoked Fisher Price and primary: childhood, which for me took place 1995-2005.
I’m primed to seek out skulls but you could easily miss this one and see a fruit bowl with four pears instead – you would still have to ask why it was rendered this way and perhaps arrive at skull through inquiry.
Pieces (Slices of a Life)
The one-word title Pieces was prompted first by the focal ‘wedge’. I suspected if you overlaid the golden ratio on the painting, the wedge would be at the nucleus of spiral, which I later confirmed in Affinity Photo (better Photoshop). A wedge of citrus is of course, a segment, not whole.
On closer inspection, there was a lack of ‘wholes’ in the painting. Firstly the pears in the bowl (the ‘skull’) were ‘implied pears’, just the line drawing unlike the apples (or cherries) which were colored in and shadowed. The ‘vase’ empty in the top left is empty, but is also incompletely lineated: the black line not fully drawn but instead splodged and continued clockwise from it’s first circular mark. The lack of fruit alongside stem in the ‘vase’ at bottom mid-right feels incomplete: if it was a gourd or butternut squash, the stem would not make sense so it is read as a vase, but then why only a stem, no flowers nor fruit? Partial.
The constrained, almost squashed, warped flatlay-esque composition makes things feel fragmented: why can’t I get a long enough, good enough look at any of the objects painted? The colors used: red hot, web safe blue, saturated yellow all remind me of heatmaps. Heatmaps are a deliberately constrained view of a space to emphasise certain information. I added the bracketed (Slices of a Life) from the concept of hindered view, selection, anthology.
Most interestingly, the painting as a whole echoes ‘unfinished’ due to the white in top left and bottom right. Nearly 75% of the right side of the canvas is white, as canvas typically arrives in shades of white this reads incomplete (even though its painted, because canvas is not so bright white as this). Even more intriguing, this “negative space” does not really echo unfinished, – but cut off – because it is so deliberately present.
Line, Form, Size
There’s a lump in my throat when I imagine the artist raising hands with brush to make these marks, of course emotion can cloud judgement. Emotion can also guide judgment, which is likely why I judge the line work to be deliberate, controlled, very intentional. This did not feel like it was painted fast, it felt considered. The notable exception in control is the ‘splodged line’ of the ‘vase’ in top right, which left spatters on the jelly like forms behind it.
The shapes are very angular despite featuring literal circles and ovals. This makes it feel like a collage, cut and paste because household scissors have a similar effect on magazines. This also creates energy, not stillness. The painting feels like an ongoing of the present, not a photo of a day in the life of the artist.
Cherise
To understand the cherries in Cherry, which are made prominent intentionally in the title, we look to cherry symbolism. This topic deserves a book – which I read – so I am greatly indebted to Constance L. Kirker and Mary Newman’s Cherry.
The etymology of cherry includes surname Chyrimuth (cherry-mouth) from Anglo-French cherise, of course Modern French is cerise. The ‘ise’ drops due to being misread as plural in English, hence cherry. It may come from Greek kerasian (kerasos being cherry tree).
Cherries feature often in art about morality, and mortality! In Bosch’s famous triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, there are cherries on the head of several nudes, some of which are riding goats, and some nudes wield a cherry in their hands. One interpretation of Bosch’s cherries comes alongside the Lutheran proverb “Don’t eat cherries with great lords – they’ll throw the pits in your face” where cherries connote pleasure, but also sin and temptation. Therefore, cherries indicate wickedness perhaps clandestine encounters, especially when the goat (Satan’s bro) is present. Another interpretation of Bosch’s cherries sees innocence in humanity: cherry used to be slang for a young girl; maybe the nudes hold cherries because they don’t know any better.
Cherries are affiliated with pleasure, indeed life-saving pleasure in the Iranian film “Taste of Cherry” where they avert suicide for the protagonist because he experiences the pleasure of consuming them. They symbolise a certain sanitation, sexification, thingification because the actual fruit featured in the movie is mulberries. The petite cherry sells, the beauty is why we don’t tie mulberry stems in our mouths as party tricks. Cherries are cheeky and hold attention.
“We shall know them by their fruits”–Matthew 8:16
Imploring my mother to disregard this section, I cannot ignore the flirtier connotations of the cherry. The cherry emoji reads as so much that it mostly reads unclearly: Cherry Emoji Twitter hypersexualises the cherry, but only 23% of participants in a study identified sexual meanings for the cherry emoji. Reddit threads frequently yield varying meanings such as ‘in a relationship’ or just that the cherry is cute, so girls like to put it in their bio to affiliate themselves with the youthful, flirty energy of a cherry 🍒🍒🍒.
In growing up on Tumblr, you could hardly escape the nymphet-Lolita connotations of the cherry fruit, further deepened by mass misunderstanding of Lana del Rey’s song Cherry. There, the cherry was visual shorthand for a set of behaviors mimicking a certain lifestyle that people were not engaging in, just looking at with wistfulness-aversion-consumption. In del Rey’s Cherry the fruit seems to symbolise innocence, passion, love, ruined. She uses cherries as a specifically feminine and indeed erotic fruit, akin to Christina Rosetti evoking specific fruits in Goblin Market to emphasise feminine ruin.
Coming back to Cherry: what’s Fielding doing with the cherries? In painting an almost confrontational, arresting cherry red before he leaves, he’s talking about a life that was delicious. I think the cherries indicate shouldn’t-be-there longing, lust for life. Cherries being edible are tied to consuming, being eaten. Eat the cherry of life, if you’re in the pits you experienced possession of the fruit (a metaphor used in my ‘Cherryeater’ mini vignette).
They may symbolise interrogation of morality: sin, more likely acceptance? With certainty I can say the painting is sweet, not regretful. The red is bright, youthful, energetic. The maroon limited. The brown does not impede the energy of the blue, black, pink and red: it actually adds a cozy, safety by evoking interiors, wood and roots.
What’s curious: the title is not Cherries. It is Cherry, singular. The painting appears to feature Cherries, two. Shakespeare’s famous quote from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ puts cherries in pairs, as does the emoji. The decoupling in the title might be because Fielding was looking squarely at death, alone.
“So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
If those are cherries and not apples, they are outsized, just like the huge canvas. I hope his life featured oversized pleasure.
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Playlist
- CHERRY by LANA del REY
- BLACK CHERRY by HUDSON MOHAWKE
- CHERRY BOMB by TYLER THE CREATOR
- CHERRY by RINA SAWAYAMA
Selection of Author’s Favorite Consumables
- Sour cherry juice with tonic water
- Maraschino cherries (Luxardo only)
- Cherry Coke Zero
- Black Forest Cake
Reading
• Cheri by COLETTE
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