"Measures of Productivity" - 12x12 inch oil painting

“Measures of Productivity” original oil painting by Melanie Fenton - 2023

This colour story was inspired by my first trip to Costa Rica. As a university student and budding field biologist, I took a month-long field primatology course in a very soggy rainforest in Eastern Costa Rica.

A lot of unpack in the title of this painting. This piece took me over a year to complete. So please, let us not measure productivity in number of creations over time spent.

While in Costa Rica on a field course in 2012 I did a research project on feeding competition in capuchin monkeys. One of the measures I was interested in was the productivity of trees, or rather, how much fruit was there? There are ways to estimate the productivity of a tree other than counting up all the fruits (impossible). One of these is diameter at breast height (DBH) another is crown volume. Long story short, I spent a lot of time soaking wet in the rainforest measuring tree trunks and gazing up into the canopy and in my opinion not nearly enough time watching monkeys. If I were to measure the productivity of that research project by interesting results or published papers, well, it was a bust.

But if I measure it by that fact that 10 years later, I can still feel the cold rain dripping into my eyes, I can see the brilliant greens and flashes of red and the diffused light coming in from above, and I can hear the food peeps of dozens of little monkeys, and that that is all enough to inspire a series of little abstract paintings. Well, I’ll call that extremely productive.

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Size: 12” x 12” x 1.5”

Medium: Oil paint on gallery wrapped canvas. Initialed on the front, signed and titled on the back. Ready to hang.

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Copyright: Melanie Fenton retains all rights to the artwork. Artwork may not be resold or reproduced for profit in any way without the artist's written permission.