Lemon juicer and Diamond Painting

Inspiration:

Have you ever felt like a square orange getting juiced?

This work emerged from a fascination with materialism and the arbitrary nature of value—how two equally beautiful objects can be deemed worth vastly different amounts simply based on perception and marketing. What transforms a common household tool into something mundane while elevating a mineral fragment to the status of luxury?

Drawing from found imagery used in advertising, the piece explores the seductive power of visual allure—the calculated sparkle and eye-catching glamour that sells us dreams. These are the false promises of consumer culture, the manufactured desire that drives our material obsessions.

The composition plays with pop imagery as satire, turning advertising's own weapons against itself. A humble lemon juicer sits alongside a diamond, both bathed in the same seductive deep blues. In this shared light, their supposed hierarchy dissolves, revealing the absurdity of our material valuations.

The work asks: What makes one object precious and another ordinary? And who decided?

The irony isn't lost on me—here I am, creating flat representations of three-dimensional objects, critiquing materialism through the very act of making something to sell. Perhaps that's the point. In a world where everything becomes commodity, even our resistance to commodification becomes... well, a commodity. As a painter, I exist in this constant contradiction: making 2D objects in a 3D world, selling critiques of the very system I'm participating in.

Maybe that's what makes us all feel like square oranges getting juiced.