The Story
Nowhere
for anything to hide
Clear is the least forgiving material in the atelier. A pigment can cover a mistake; a clear multiplies it — a bubble, a hair, a fingerprint from the wrong glove, all of it magnifies as the layers go on. So the set is built in six thin passes rather than two thick ones, each one cured before the next and each one wiped and inspected under a loupe. Roughly one tip in four is set aside before the fruit ever goes in.
The strawberries are shaded from the inside out: a wash of deep red at the skin, a pale core kept almost white, then the seeds put in one at a time with the point of a needle. A real slice is never uniformly red, and the moment you make one uniformly red it turns into a sticker. The glass around them is chosen for refraction rather than colour — seven tints that each bend the light differently, so the surface keeps producing small events long after you have stopped looking at the fruit.
One tip in four never makes it to the fruit.