Fancy Oranges 11″x17″ Graphite on 2 ply smooth Bristol.

Third of five images in Fancy Fruit renderings.

Sliced, wedged, or just peeled and eaten, oranges have a taste that looks like tangy fun. The sections have a texture, and the fruity meaty part have a different texture. The cell sections have a slight resistance to being bit into.  Fun to peel, fun to squeeze (but can be dangerous as choking hazards), oranges are not as much fun to hold as a banana, but are far more popular to compose in still life paintings.

The surface of an orange is hard to render because of its bumpy, dimpled complexion.  Most often, you will see one of two styles: a palette knife approach with broad, orange colored strokes defining shape and shadow, or a near photographic detailed painting showing off high skills in rendering.  Anything in between these two styles is usually including an orange as a part of a larger composition where the overall image is created, rather than the personality of the individual fruit.  I like all these styles too, but for my rendition of an orange it seemed to be more interesting to just make a black and white graphite image of a response to how they are perceived in memory.

Orange facts:

After chocolate and vanilla, orange is the world’s favorite flavor.

Oranges came to the New World in 1493, on the Christopher Columbus voyage II.  Of all the orange crop only about 20% are sold intact (whole). Orange juice, preserves, and extract comprise the rest.

Florida is the number one producer of oranges in the U.S. & number two in the world.

The name “orange” is not to name the color of the fruit. Originally, the Arabic word naranj was used to describe the fruit flavor.  In English (wrong word division), the word became narange, and over time lost the initial “n” and the a became an O in the 14 century.  Orange (the color of the fruit) was then used as a name for that color in 1540.  So, the color got its name from the fruit, not the other way around.

jmc/emc