243. Raspberry and white chocolate ice cream in Alessi bowl (Himbeer- und weißes Schokoladeneis in einer Alessi-Schale)

243. Raspberry and white chocolate ice cream in Alessi bowl (Himbeer- und weißes Schokoladeneis in einer Alessi-Schale), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 15 × 20cm, (Darryn Ansted)

This is a modern bowl. I searched for a long time to find a good bowl. There were many decorative bowls from many decades ago available online. Oceans of them. I inadvertently became a Meissen fanatic. I almost went to their recent inaugural Meissen conference. These are the dangers of being a painter. There were relatively few modern bowls that appealled to me. This was the most interesting and affordable modern bowl I found. It was around 25 Euros. It now lives in our kitchen. It is a newish bowl from Alessi that was designed by a Dutch designer. When it arrived, it was nothing like the photograph. So, perhaps you are not getting a very clear idea of it from this painting. It is essentially a dome with 8 scalloped arcs: four big and four small arcs to be precise. It is a perfect object of simultaneous utility and craving for delight. Or, as Belinda would say: wonder. It sits again on the black mirror. Inside are scoops of ice cream.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. These two scoops of ice cream are actually sitting on a waffle. Otherwise, they would be too low to see. It was necessary to do this to get more of the profile angle of the bowl in the frame. Speaking of the frame, in this series I really pushed the painting to the very edge of the canvas. Without doing this there would not have been enough room to develop the charcater of the ice cream. The ice cream would become a smudge without aspects like the tiny frozen ice crystals on top of them.

Mmmmmmmm, ice cream.