238. Chocolate and mango ice cream in red and white porcellan (Schokoladen- und Mango-eis in rot-weißem Porzellan)

238. Chocolate and mango ice cream in red and white porcellan (Schokoladen- und Mango-eis in rot-weißem Porzellan), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 15 × 20cm, (Darryn Ansted)

Here are chocolate and mango ice cream scoops. The coupling of familiar forms with abstract content seems to be the character of everyday life to me. In the studio, it is the same. When you have to pull something together you have to go into your mental garden, which is full of both native and transplanted formless thoughts and sensations. You gather them like handfuls of berries and try to get the painting to stand up. I’m casually interested in Ikebana. I have never read about it. I just like to enjoy it naively. For me, still life is like psychological Ikebana. Dairy and citrus, dark and light, Sweet and acidic, But here too are mango and cocoa made uniform, two lives melting together.

My old art professor once said to me that painters paint because they can’t do anything else. That sentence was always like a stone in my shoe. I have read countless accounts of artists on didactic panels and in books. All this information gradually congeals to form a familiar sensation of who the artist is behind a particular work. Their work then usually comes to look partly like a logical result of the wider context and partly just like a sparkle of human spirit never to be replicated again. It is an experience that I often have with painters from centuries ago. I don’t know if it is that painters can’t do anything else. Instead I would say that certain intersections make paintings. What is outside? What is inside? How do you bring the inside outside and vice versa?