Apple & Jack / Oil on Canvas

• Bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
• One dramatically bitten or bruised apple (direct nod to 17th-century overripe fruit)
• Low, heavy tumbler with just a finger of liquor left
• Dark, almost black void background (replaces the old dark oak table)
• Occasionally a burnt-out cigarette, vape pen, or dead phone added

The symbolism is brutally direct:

• Bitten apple → knowledge that leads to expulsion/fall, now re-read as the morning-after regret of the knowledge that last night’s escape was temporary.
• Whiskey → modern equivalent of the vanitas wine: intoxicant that promises transcendence but delivers headache and emptiness.
• Empty or near-empty glass → life running out, liver giving up, bank account drained.

Notable Contemporary Practitioners

• Ori Gersht – photographs exploding fruit in slow motion (literal vanitas violence)
• Sam Taylor-Wood – time-lapse videos of rotting fruit (1990s–2000s)
• Mat Collishaw – hyper-real still lifes with maggots crawling under the paint surface
• Christian Patterson – Redheaded Peckerwood series (crime-scene vanitas)

In short:

The skull has been replaced by the hangover, the hourglass by the dying phone battery, and the silver ewer by the iconic Jack Daniel’s bottle. The message is no longer “Repent, sinner” but “Enjoy it while it lasts, because tomorrow you’ll still be you—only older and more broke.”
The vanitas never died; it just started drinking alone.

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Shipping Included Domestic