The Story Behind Strawberry Graveyard (And the Reading I Never Saw Coming)

Strawberry Graveyard is strawberries and cream with skulls hidden inside it. Sugar on the surface, bones underneath, painted in the brightest colours I own so that nobody sees the second half straight away.

That was the whole plan. Sweetness as the trap. Something lovely that is quietly also about the fact that everything ends. I have been painting variations of that idea for years and I thought I understood my own picture pretty well.

Then somebody gave me a completely different reading

They pointed out that for a diabetic, this painting is not a metaphor. It is a description.

Sugar as something genuinely dangerous. Sweetness that has to be counted, measured and taken seriously instead of just enjoyed. A body where the nice thing on the plate is also the thing that can go wrong. Strawberries with skulls in them is not a poetic exaggeration in that case, it is roughly how the relationship actually works.

I am not the person to explain the medical side of that, and I am not going to try. But the moment I heard it, the painting rearranged itself in my head. I had built a metaphor and handed it to someone who lives inside the literal version.

Why I like that better than my own version

Painters do not get to own what their work means. You get to decide what goes on the canvas, and then it leaves and becomes other people's property. That used to bother me slightly. It stopped bothering me about the fiftieth time somebody explained one of my own paintings to me and was more interesting about it than I had been.

This one is my favourite example so far, because it does not contradict what I painted. It sharpens it. My version is philosophical: sweetness and mortality, sugar as a way of talking about time running out without being grim about it. Their version has a blood sugar monitor in it. Same painting, one of the readings just costs more to live with.

What is actually in the picture

Strawberries, cream, and skulls tucked between them where you have to look twice. Pink on pink on pink, which is the point: the colours are doing the seducing while the shapes do the warning.

Nothing in it is meant to be a jump scare. Cute creepy works best when the creepy part is patient, when the picture stays pleasant on the wall for weeks and then someone notices what is sitting between the fruit. I wrote about how that mechanism works in What Is Cute Creepy Art?, and about the very old tradition it comes out of in Memento Mori and Vanitas Art. Painters have been putting skulls next to fruit for about four hundred years. I just made the fruit louder.

Sweetness with something wrong in it is the whole project

This is where the name Candy Decay came from. Sweet things going off, bright things with something rotten underneath, sugar as a way of talking about mortality without the black clothes. The full story of how I landed on that is in Finding My Art Style: Candy Decay.

Strawberry Graveyard is probably the most literal version of it I have painted. It is a dessert and a cemetery in one plate, and now, thanks to one person's message, it is also a painting about a body that has to negotiate with sugar every single day.

Tell me what you see in it

Readings like this one are the reason I ask. If you look at Strawberry Graveyard and see something I did not put there on purpose, I would like to hear it. Half of what I now believe about my own work arrived in a message from a stranger.

The print is hand-signed for 35 euro, and the rest of the sweet and slightly wrong collection lives in the hand-signed prints.