On the Table, I Cannot Stop (Lemons)

2025, oil on canvas, 6 x 8 x 1.5 in, walnut floater frame

You’re looking at a bowl of lemons that seem to light themselves from within—golden, electric, burning against a deep violet ground. The painting is small, but the energy isn’t. The fruit crowds the rim, pressing outward as if it might spill over at any second, humming with the urgency of ripeness. Still life stops being still. You can almost feel the weight, the slick skin, the sense that one more moment and they’ll roll off the table and scatter, insisting you pay attention.

In art history, lemons sit on the sharp edge of pleasure—brightness with a bite, sweetness cut by sting. Here, they hold the emotional tension between desire and restraint: the feeling of wanting more, of circling back again and again, unable to quite look away or let go. The neon undertones dial up that sense of compulsion, appetite sharpened by color and light.

This painting suggests that ordinary objects can carry an enormous charge when you really look at them. It’s a meditation on the intensity of presence—how even a bowl of fruit can become a portal to longing, memory, and sensation when you meet it without distraction.

What if it’s the smallest things that undo us? Lean in. The world is asking to be tasted.