Sketching and painting fruit is a time-honored discipline, one that shows up again and again throughout the history of art. Fruit on the vine and fruit in bowls and people snacking upon various peelable foodstuffs have served as principal subjects for watercolorists for centuries.
Then there's actually drawing upon fruit, as in taking a ballpoint pen and pressing it to a banana peel. Studies, if such studies were done, would likely show that anyone who has sat at a table with a pen and a peel-thick fruit within reach has likely gotten up to some artistic mischief involving both.
That peel-as-canvas whimsy will be out in full fruitastic force on Saturday, Aug. 29 when Fallen Fruit calls upon the Central Library. You know Fallen Fruit -- this is the art-minded, community-sweet organization that plans happenings around things that grow on trees, fruit tours, vines that hang over public property, and such -- and you know, like other Fallen Fruit events, this one will be tart.
Very tart: The lemon is the star. As are you. Visit the Central Library's Maguire Gardens, chat with the Fallen Fruit people, choose a lovely sunny-bright lemon, and draw a portrait.
Not any portrait, mind you, but your own. As in your beautiful face. On a lemon. Complete with your freckles or the mole below your nose or your thick eyelashes or your chin dimple.
Lemonade Stand is "a public participatory artwork" and there's a sweet payment at the end for your portrait: A glass of organic lemonade.
Will all the lemon portraits be presented together? Indeed, as a way of "illustrating some of the archetypes that construct community." In addition to drawing portraits on lemons, and sipping lemonade, attendees can add to the larger story of the day by offering advice on what to do "when life gives you lemons."
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Make lemonade, of course, but not before drawing your own fabulous face on the bumpily, knobby, sunshine-pretty peel of the famously tart fruit.
