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In my so-far short foray into the arena of still-life painting, I had never 
considered texture. Duh. Here, I wanted to make tomatoes look shiny 
and translucent. I had always focused on the texture of the medium---
the paint, the ink, the pastel . . . hadn't linked it to the texture of any 
object I wanted to portray. There are so many elements to juggle: color, 
value, texture, dimension, space, making an object look like the object, 
making it occupy space, making multiple objects take their place in a 
composition: almost too many to hold equally all at the same time. For 
months, I was obsessed with Jacob Collins' and Abbey Ryan's work 
(I so admire their ability) but it's not my nature to work that realistically. 
It made me insane. :-)