Speaking of repeating myself

Dissecting yesterday’s grocery store vegetable display photo was a fun task. It reminded me of another vegetable photo with repeating patterns, varied colors and contrasts and a pixelated design.

Mary Bridgman operates an organic and traditional farm in central Ohio. Every year as the first tomatoes ripen in the spring she appears at the Uptown Westerville Farmers Market with a large display of her variety of cherry tomatoes.

I always look forward to seeing her through the growing season as more of her vegetables ripen and the variety increases. Always eager to lure in a new customer she offers free samples of any produce knowing that freshly ripened and picked tomatoes are far different than grocery store varieties. Even people who have their own tomato plants enjoy Mary’s variety of tastes, textures and colors.

I’m also sucked into her world for the same reasons. Mary gives me a little latitude as I hover over her sales tables searching for a better photo than my last visit. She’s a former newspaper reporter who abandoned the newsroom for 67 acres of dirt and the vagaries of weather and the economy to make a living. Her hands are now stained with soil from her land instead of ink from freshly printed newspapers. That’s her hand at the left in this photo from my “Farmer’s Hands” series.

Each week her display is a random arrangement of color and shape creating a pointillist pixelization of repeating and chaotic patterns certainly worth standing atop a step ladder to shoot. I sometimes wondered if Mary made some of the arrangements just for me so I would be surprised at her seemingly serendipitous displays.

If she does, I’m grateful.

Look closely at this arrangement of tomatoes. Notice the balancing elements inside the frame. A single basket of green tomatoes at top right. Four rows of orange tomatoes at right balanced by a single row of brighter tomatoes at left. Broad selection of colors in the center with slightly more yellow toward the right to create a larger object centered in the right third of the frame. The same baskets are included in the other large object that begins at the edge of the row with the green tomatoes and completed with reds and moves alt the way to the left edge.

Like any working mosaic image, the collection and relationship of the smaller objects melds into a single object that holds your eye.

Amazing how a small collection of tomatoes on a sales table at a small farmers market on a Wednesday summer afternoon creates a tableau of our daily lives.

Repeating patterns with an element of chaos. Enjoy your day.