Fruit Piece c. 1925

Pamela Bianco made this still life, ‘Fruit Piece’, as a print. She must have been thinking about the old masters, all those Dutch still lifes with fruit tumbling out of bowls, you know. But instead of the lush colors of oil paint, she's working with just black and white, creating tone through tiny stippled dots. Look how she builds up the darkness in the background, like a velvety curtain, and then uses the same technique to model the forms of the fruit and flowers. I wonder what it was like for her, spending hours placing those tiny dots. It's almost meditative, a kind of slow, deliberate way of seeing. I can imagine her feeling her way around the shapes, letting the image emerge gradually, bit by bit, like a photographic print developing in a darkroom. And even though it’s just black and white, there’s a real sense of light and shadow. She seems to be having a conversation with those still life painters of the past, responding to their ideas but in a way that’s totally her own.