Essay—Thinking about Bananas

I like bananas for how expressive they are and how easily they morph into other things: a crescent moon, a tornado, a nose, a boomerang, etc. And I like the banana's graceful form. A banana is an arabesque in the round, challenging to draw, though I doubt we ever drew one in art school.


 In Basic Drawing, we rarely drew fruit of any kind, and never a banana. In Life Drawing we drew human beings in every conceivable (and inconceivable) position but never in relation to any other objects, not even clothing, much less bananas.

Our Life Drawing professor once told us, "If you can draw a woman's breast, you can draw anything." It was exactly at that moment that I began thinking about bananas. My very first thought was, "au contraire, if you can draw a banana you can draw anything".

I often want to draw a banana. In my works, sometimes a banana isn't just a banana but a compositional device, a trick, or an icon. Examine the bananas in the following pictures and decide for yourself:

"Banatmosphere", "Through the Window", "Stormy Banana",
"Lunar Drift", "Banana Moon", and "Epiphany".

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