Before the peach was a summer fruit it belonged to the gods. The peach comes from China, where it has been cultivated for at least four thousand years and where it carried the grandest possible symbolism: immortality. The Queen Mother of the West tended an orchard of peach trees that bloomed every three thousand years, and the fruit granted eternal life to whoever ate it. Gods, emperors, and mythological heroes went to considerable lengths to get one. The peach also drove away evil spirits across East Asia, a belief that spread through the region and is still embedded in ceremonial practice. So the same fruit sitting in a bowl on my counter was, across most of human history, serious supernatural business.
The painters of the Renaissance took all of that history seriously. In the visual language of the period, a peach with its leaf still attached was a symbol for cor et lingua — the heart and the tongue, meaning truth spoken from the heart. A peach is shaped something like a heart, and the leaf beside it stood for the word that comes from it. Painters tucked them into portraits of people they wished to compliment, and into still lifes where they wanted the room to carry a little moral weight alongside the bowl of fruit.
What I wanted on the panel was the fuzz. Peach fuzz is a defense mechanism — it deters insects and slows water loss — and it does something particular to light that I haven’t found in any other fruit. It scatters it. A cherry reflects cleanly and gives you a proper highlight you can place with a brush. A peach just glows, diffuse and warm all over, which means you’re not painting a highlight so much as painting a light source. I spent most of the day on that problem, and I’m not sure I’ve entirely solved it, but I think I’ve gotten close enough.
P.S. — The peach reached Georgia in the 1500s via Spanish missionaries. South Carolina has quietly grown more of them for decades and has never quite gotten the credit. Some misattributions are stickier than others.
No. 77 ∙ Peaches
Oil on wood panel · 6 × 8 in. · 2026 · framed in a graywashed gold frame
This painting has found its home. See the original, or bring home a fine art print.
Join my Collector’s Circle for first looks at new paintings, early access to originals, and notes from my studio.
