232. Melon and chocolate ice cream with waffle wafer (Melonen-Schokoladen-Eis mit Waffel)

232. Melon and chocolate ice cream with waffle wafer (Melonen- und Schokoladen-Eis mit Waffel), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 20 × 15cm, (Darryn Ansted)

It’s the bottle, not the wine. That’s not how I live but when it comes to painting it is sometimes true. I want to get at ice cream but it does not stay still, does not stay cold, does not stay formed. It has a different sense of time and space. Painting it is like a paradox. It is like painting a person. Fortunately, using a photograph makes it possible to paint more temporary, passing events like a laugh or indeed someone giving birth, or in this case melting ice cream. Nonetheless, I still want the quietness and space of painting to hold these moments. Also, in my head I think that painting ‘has to be what only a painting can be’ and otherwise one could just photograph it. Or, indeed, use colored pencils. There in painting, it just simply feels much more like trying to summon something. How often do you feel like you have been reading the manual upside down? Almost always in my studio. I only know what anything is after I have tried to summon it, such as right now, in the writing of this blog post, for example. Prior to that I am in the fire, or as I wrote yesterday, in the waterfall.

When I paint an ice cream, I find myself spending quite a lot of time thinking about the vessel that I paint. Already I also mostly settled on two scoops. A couple. Two personalities. Two complementary pieces or contrasting flavors. Another chord joins in with the bowl. I don’t think it needs to be overcomplicated, just, I like traditional processes, the hand-made and simple things, things that come from workshops. Ice cream as a phenomenon is somehow not inert and can only really be read in the embrace of some kind of vessel. In doing this project, I feel like I have inadvertently become a bowl fanatic. I went down the rabbit hole. Which vessel? I looked through hundreds, maybe thousands. Yes. I know. But it’s the kind of neurotic attention to detail that makes it come together, I hope in a unique way. Even when using the waffle that I would paint I had to insist on the right kind of flour to produce the golden-brown color that the painting needed. However, painting should look a bit jangly. I love the idiosyncrasy of medieval and early renaissance masters or even some modern painting.