I want to go to the Union Square Greenmarket at least once a week for the purposes of this blog. It's easy to fill your digital camera there. Ripe fruit on weathered tables, tent rigging and truck tires in the background. Magic Markered signs on cardboard explaining the more unusual items and their seasonality. Farmers in jeans and aprons behind the table handing bags of fruit to the urbane Union Square pedestrians who receive them like trophies from a healthier world. It's a surreal oasis. My problem was which photographs to select to paint.

I always take too long to paint. I make each painting too precious and tie myself in sketches and preparation and tweak details endlessly until they look like mud, never properly learning which risks to take. That is no way to refine and develop skills, right?

With these still lifes, the 'preparation' is just which fruits/vegetables I select from the seasonal offerings available at the Greenmarket. The primary value of the work is in the freshness and transience of the fruit and how well I capture that. So I have to learn to work quickly and honestly. I expect that to be difficult because it won't always be pretty and I hate to give up on a painting before it looks 'pretty'. But it's better to develop a style once you're confident in using the tools you have.

I had a teacher at one of my previous colleges who told a story about a pottery class. The teacher divided the class into two and instructed one half to work on making the most perfect pots they could all year. The other half was told they would be evaluated on the number of pots they produced, not the quality. At the end of the year, which half was producing refined shapes and which half was still wringing their hands in frustration?