This blog comes as a retrospective of summer. My focus has been making images of plants at our farm. Particularly, the peach orchard and corn field have drawn me in.

This summer, I finished a painting of our blossoming peach orchard that I started in rainy spring 2020(?). In typical Anna fashion, it had a portal. The portal was akin to the skin on peach fruit, so I had to wait till the peaches were ripe to complete the painting. Making art of the farm is often like that. I start an image, paint as much as I can, and then put it aside till the season comes around again.

I love the complexity of peach skin because it is alive and multilayered like human skin. A photo simply cannot capture it, so I need the real thing as a reference. In my mind, peaches are yellow. As kids, my siblings and I would go to my grandma's farm every summer. She had a tiny orchard of cherished yellow peaches. Nowadays though, peaches I see are quite ruby colored. My husband grows white and yellow varieties, meaning they are white or yellow flesh inside, but the outsides have lovely, rosy cheeks. Each row is a different variety, each of which ripens at a unique time, in succession, which extends the harvest season. My husband, Andrew, is brilliant that way.

Anyway, standing out there in the peach orchard, I was inspired to make an intaglio plate of the peach orchard in the summer. The method used is intaglio a la poupee, which means using a felt dauber to apply the different colors onto the plate. I made the first 7 in the limited edition of 20 of this plate. Now that peach season is over, I will wait to complete the edition in summer 2023.

Big cats tend to make appearances to me when making art. The peach orchard painting has a bobcat in it because I saw a bobcat then too. Anyway, when that peach painting is ready to varnish, I'll post a photo of the completed work.