Every morning for forty days, I set one Bartlett pear on the kitchen table, under the north window, and painted it before the light changed. Same pear, same table, same hour. My cat, the critic, watched the first eleven from the chair, then gave up.

The early paintings are all outline. By pear #12 I was copying what I knew a pear looks like, not the one in front of me. Around #20 the fruit began to bruise and lean, and I had to look again every day, because it was no longer yesterday’s pear.

You only see it by the thirtieth try: the freckles, the brown at the stem, the way the skin takes the window. The painting stopped being a picture of a pear and became a record of looking. It’s just a pear.