Carrots

11/15: Carrots, oil on linen panel, 4x5 in. SOLD

I didn't want to use a cad. red or orange to expand my palette, so the color wasn't exactly right. But painting isn't about matching it perfectly, and within the range of my everyday palette it's close enough. (Here the camera flattened a couple shots of red at the carrot tops.) The real hard thing though was just trying to get the local color shifts and light on the forms. I don't blame the small size, as even in a quarter-inch space or less one should be able to get a full range of values and hues.

Old English word of the day:

wealhmore [wĕəl(KH)'-môr-ə]: carrot? Literally, a foreign (Welsh?) root.

From more, "an (edible) root, carrot, parsnip." The word "carrot" didn't appear in English until the 16th century and it's generally agreed that before then a carrot (in Anglo-Saxon England) was something wilder, smaller, and white, yellow, or purplish red; the orange color would be developed in Europe. On the question of the name, here I am gratefully summarizing part of a summary of info on this very topic once posted kindly by another gentleman (it's hard to find answers to these sorts of things sometimes!). The Old English word apparently could have been applied to any root vegetable, and the term wealh- or Wylisc [wül'-ĭsh] more might have been used for "carrot" while an Englisc more was a parsnip. The site Regia Anglorum also mentions this, though reversing the Welsh/English bit. Very confusing!