Pomegranates
I have two large bowls of pomegranates in my refrigerator. A year into the pandemic, they’re hard to find in the grocery store, so I’m holding onto the ones I have, even though they’re well past their prime.
I love the lumps and bumps I can feel beneath the surface as they are drying out. There’s more to feel now, more to look at. I can’t stop turning them in my hand.
I bought the original one, and a mate for it, to have a subject to draw and paint. I was attracted to the red and to the small seeds inside. It has become a symbol for everything - for love and beauty, simplicity and complexity, order and disorder.
My first drawing of the pomegranate was of the whole fruit. It was the abstracted shape, no details, just color surrounded by chaos, energy lines, darker colors, a corona of red spikes.
Image at right: pomegranate juice, print from the sliced pomegranate
But what I really wanted was to see the inside. I cut its mate in half, put the two halves in a bowl, and got out my paints. I’m not sure what I expected from mother nature. Maybe more order, rows of seeds leading into the center like spokes on a wheel. And it looks like that was the attempt. But the actuality is that there is chaos inside. The lines of seeds aren’t even at all; they meander and in places you can barely tell that they are lines.
The seeds are nestled up against each other, some cut in half because they got in the way of the knife, some intact with their shiny wine-red casings. Like little teeth in the round mouth of a crazy demon.
But I guess the important thing is that it works. Nature has figured out that the line-up doesn’t have to be perfect. The seeds are still delicious, the pomegranate still multiplies, and it has inspired a member of another species to spend a long winter week contemplating its beauty.