Still Life with Buddha Hand Fruit

Buddha Hand Fruits are rare! They are only available for about three weeks of the year during the Winter season and have become popular in recent years, making it that much more challenging to source them. Otherwise known as fingered citron, they are a kind of lemon, very fragrant and when they are not used for offerings to the Buddha, they are used to make candied fruit for special occasions. There are two main forms of Buddha hand fruits, the open and closed forms. The closed form is regarded very highly amongst enthusiasts as they resemble hands in prayer. Because of the difficulty in finding the right specimens, it has taken me quite some time to finally get to paint this rather special fruit! I have arranged the fruit with a fan, decorative material and a backdrop of a section of an image I captured recently of the Exhibition Fountain at the Carlton Gardens.This mixed media work has a surrealist slant, in that the snake form of the fruit's fingers have a ghost like appearance and the three orange/red carps appear to be starting to morph out of the cloth.