Grape Jelly - by Darren Maurer

5" x 5"

I saw this little blob of grape jelly a few mornings ago and noticed how cool it looked. The hot white highlights, the reflected cool blue light on the shadowed side, the deep dark almost black areas within the heart of the blob, the areas where light is captured inside the jelly like the finest gem stone and screams out with the most intense shade of red-violet ever seen. Now that is one cool blob of grape jelly! When I started my blog page over five years ago the one thing I wanted to project to visitors was the process of "seeing.....and not just looking". I call it seeing the "extraordinary within the ordinary". Many people just look and don't really see all the great things around them. All people have their own ideas of what around them is great to see. My family and friends would be the first to attest in my uncanny ability to see the extraordinary within the ordinary.....or at least what is extraordinary to me. As they are all appalled thinking to themselves, "What?" they have witnessed me standing on chairs and table tops in restaurants taking photos of plates of food, silverware, ketchup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, shadows from a window blind raking across a place setting. They have watched me paint items from grocery store shelves, half eaten pieces of watermelon, cereal bowls left behind after breakfast, slobbery lollipops discarded by children, and the foamy rich little brown bubbles on the surface of a freshly poured cup of hot chocolate. They have seen completed commission pieces such as a weed emerging from a crack in a sidewalk, a favorite glass of wine backlit from a nearby window, tricycles, game boards, and slices of pizza. It seems the ideas for painting subjects from "seeing" the coolness in everyday ordinary items around me will never cease. Even a little blob of grape jelly dropped onto a countertop will do. You have to "see" it, or at any rate, I have to see it and then show it to you. I was reminded of all this yesterday when my youngest and now seventeen year old daughter walked into my studio and said, "Tell me you're not painting a little blob of jelly?" I was....and now I'm showing it to all of you. I want to thank the thousands and thousands of people that have followed this blog for the past five plus years. I'll keep painting. This painting will be available later this summer beginning in July.