This little painting in a narrow palette of three reds was originally meant to be an exercise in color, but ultimately became about the tiny, interior landscape of waiting: a world of warm tones and nuance where the smallest variations seem immense. It’s an imagining into the biology of perfect timing, of femininity and fertility, as echoed in the title, Ripe. I love the idea that all the children a woman might ever bear are present as single cells of potential within her body throughout her life, awaiting their future release even before her birth. This is the meaning of the wise women’s saying, “You have heard your Grandmother’s heartbeat.” Each woman who has walked the earth was present as an egg in her infant mother’s ovary when that infant was still in her own mother’s womb.