Flame

In this painting, Tomlinson depicts a blood orange being peeled in dense impasto, emphasising its saturated colour and material excess. The composition is rotated vertically, so the act of peeling unfolds sideways. As the peel lifts, it forms a triangular shape that reads both as fruit skin and as flame. This ambiguity is reinforced by a palette of deep reds and burning oranges, in which the fruit appears almost combustible.

The work draws on the orange in European still-life painting as a sign of abundance and controlled display, alongside the queer refrain “oranges are not the only fruit,” where fruit becomes a coded language for identity and multiplicity. In the painting, this stability breaks down: the orange shifts between fruit and flame, so meaning no longer holds as a fixed symbol. Within Queer Painting: Intervals, the painting sits within a broader focus on the gaps and re-readings of art history, where familiar motifs are destabilised and re-signified. Here, the still life becomes a site of slippage between object, symbol and material transformation.