Precious Fruit (2023) extends the conceptual and formal concerns of A Still Life through its continued engagement with furniture and still-life composition. My sustained interest in still life painting reflects its capacity for reinterpretation and symbolic density.

In preparation for this series, I traveled to Paris to study museum collections and reassess my relationship to painting, particularly oil painting. Historically, oil painting had presented conceptual and emotional challenges within my practice. I struggled to claim the medium as my own.

Art-making, for me, is grounded in play, curiosity, and an intentional preservation of openness. I approach painting as a student rather than a master. In this series, oil painting became a site of technical investigation. I studied traditional recipes for oil paint mediums, referencing historical methods used by early European painters. By reconstructing these processes, I developed a renewed relationship to the medium.

This shift—paired with a selective palette rooted in intuitive color choice—allowed the material to respond to my intentions rather than dictate them. Precious Fruit thus marks a turning point in my engagement with oil painting as both material and language.