What I’m Trying To Write

Years ago I saw a miniature painting of an orange, hanging on a gallery wall in my hometown’s small art museum.

The painting was available for auction, or maybe as a raffle prize. There was an element of luck involved. I was a teenager and I didn’t have a lot of spare cash, but the raffle tickets – or the auction bids, whatever it was – weren’t very expensive. They cost about the same as the after-school burrito I’d sometimes get at the nearby Taco Bell. This seemed approachable. I put in my bid.

I didn’t get the painting, but the idea of it stayed with me. In my memory the painting is small, precise, mounted in a neat gold frame. The texture on the orange’s skin, the light on its stem end, the angle and curve of the leaf sitting nearby: all are present, and in the light of the off-screen lamp or sun or window, they glow. If I lean in close, still more details appear. The orange sits on a thin, almost-transparent woven cloth laid across a dark wood surface, presumably a table. The cloth is embroidered. The texture of the embroidery casts faint, tiny shadows on the cloth. The shadows blur at the edges, because that’s what shadows on textured cloth do.

How much of what I remember today was really in that painting? I don’t know. I never will. But I do know this:

That’s what I’m trying to write.

Of course, I’m not trying to write that orange specifically, although maybe just now that’s what I’ve done. I’m not trying to write oranges in general, although what a fruitful topic (ha!) that would be. I am, however, searching for that level of precision, that tight-in detail view. I want to create the kind of light-filled gaze that shows more and more as the viewer leans in.

I want that sense of a world in frame, a world in reality, a world waiting – or willing – to be.