in light of our recent feature on regretsy, i’d love to share exactly where that strange little fruit and nuts series of paintings came from. step in the way back machine with us, back to 2004!

ah, 2004 – what a good year. i had been laid off from oshkosh bgosh, was homeless on my sister’s couch in garden grove for a while, met the future husband… and started getting into art shows.

the very first art show i did was a group show at chango coffee house in echo park. it was a simple piece called “apple takes a stroll”. a little 5″ x 5″ acrylic painting featuring a super happy apple with stick arms and legs walkin through a park.

after the show, my good friend angela bought the painting and made the comment “this is so cute – i really wanna see apple in a knife fight with robert downey, jr!” it was like a burst of comic genius that really got my wheels turning. coincidentally, that same week i had bought a trashy tabloid mag. i was flipping through it, and… well…

i didn’t see any good pictures of robert downey, jr. but i DID see a great picture of will ferrell.

that just started an avalanche of wackiness. i flipped through a bunch of tabloid magazines, found some great celeb faces, and collaged them into twelve new paintings featuring that original Apple character along with his friends Orange, Peach, Grapes and more. They were quirky and fun, and within a year every one of the original paintings sold. The most exciting sale came at a Pasedena craft show, where the customer informed me that she worked with courtney cox-arquette on the show dirt, and the next week’s filming was going to be directed by david arquette. so she bought the painting as a gift for them!

i ran into that same customer at another craft show a year later – she gave me a great update on my little painting, that the cox-arquette family loved the painting, and that their daughter coco smiled and laughed whenever she saw it. another satisfied customer!

etsy’s shown some love for this series, too! they featured the martha piece in a storque post, and also commissioned me to create two new pieces in that stick figurey style to hang outside their conference room doors this past november.

and that’s the story! they’re a little strange, they’re a little nutty, but they’re a whole lot of fun and i love em – i hope you do too!