Harvest

Painting from the ground up

By Amy Kepferle · Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Food can be beautiful. Provisions grown with your own two hands—that which you’ve planted deep in the soil, watered, weeded, tended and, finally, placed between your lips and tasted—are even more alluring. Just ask Ferndale painter Erica Epperson, whose new exhibit, “Harvest,” highlights the bounty of her own backyard.

Celebrating the relationship between locavores and the terra firma that feeds them, Epperson’s oil and acrylic paintings make abundantly clear the connection between art and nature.

From the pearlescent glow of white onions tumbling out of a wicker basket to a stately artichoke whose purple leaves build upon one another like carefully folded origami to a platter of root vegetables nestled on a voluminous platter, each of the paintings and prints in “Harvest” are reminders of what can be accomplished with a little land, a serving of sun and a ton of inspiration.

Epperson says she first started thinking about painting from the ground up about 10 years ago when she was commissioned to create a mural for a health food store in Santa Cruz, California. The woman who hired her had a real zeal for local, sustainable agriculture—it was the reason her business existed in the first place—and wanted the art to reflect those qualities.

“She really sent me down the path of being interested in this kind of painting,” Epperson says. “I developed a passion for it and gravitated more and more to this kind of subject matter—things that honor labor and reflect a local, sustainable kind of life. That’s where it’s been developing from for a while now.”

Also in development last summer: tomatoes, way too much zucchini, carrots, beets, potatoes, broccoli, green beans, corn (which failed miserably because they grew a variety better suited to a hotter climate), squash and, of all things, quinoa.

While the produce Epperson and her family produced on their grounds was good eating, it was also quality subject matter. The self-taught artist—who, at various times in her life has also run a sign-making business and spent time crafting permanent art on people’s epidermis as a tattooist—says she doesn’t actually sit in the garden and paint. Instead, she takes photos of the fruit and veggies she’s most interested in and uses them for reference points when she sits down at the easel.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to paint in the garden before I actually paint it,” Epperson says. “Next year, I really want to grow cabbages—red cabbages, in particular—and paint them.”

Because Epperson’s colorful creations are likely to stir hunger in many different ways, it’s apt they’re being shown at Boundary Bay Brewery, where it’s possible to appreciate art while filling other basic human needs (like filling your stomach).

When asked if there’s anything she’d like people to take away from “Harvest”—other than a spanking-new piece of fine art—Epperson pauses for a moment before answering: “I want them to feel a deeper appreciation for more ordinary objects in their lives that they may not always look at very closely and appreciate their beauty.”