''Fruit fascinated me as a child. I come from a market family, my grandmother used to take me to the market every week and the colours and the shapes used to fascinate me. I used to collect the wrappers the fruit came in. Now I paint the fruit
and
vegetables of the Cape markets, but not in a classical way - in bowls. I paint them stacked in straw, ruffled in paper.''
Mark Midgley has established a reputation for his highly illusionist paintings of market fruit
and
vegetables.
After
training in the UK, he later travelled to South Africa where the lusciousness and vibrancy of the produce and the informality of their display in original packaging and wrapping inspired him to take up
painting
a
subject he had
loved
from his
youth.
The works, as a result of his masterful capturing of textures, imperfections and three dimensional shapes, are seductively immediate.
The fruit and vegetables are depicted
from
an extreme
point
of view, as if the
viewer
is
inspecting
the
case from
above as one would. Their often larger than life size gives them a monumentality that contradicts the sense of their common place familiarity. His
works
sometimes take
the visual
tease further with a
cutting
out of
the canvas to
further
place the
objects in our space.
Midgely has taken a traditional, classical and often stodgy theme, and created contemporary objects
of both
extreme beauty
and
appeal and
immediate familiarity.
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