Apples (2026): Two Ways of Being Happy
A summer afternoon under an apple tree. She holds him close, closes her eyes and kisses his cheek.
He holds her too, but his gaze travels past us, out of the picture to the right, as if he had just spotted something wonderful on the horizon.
A condition, not a story
Apples does not tell how they met or where they will go. It shows one embrace in the shade of a tree, and two people who are happy in two different ways at the same moment.
The oldest story, retold
A couple under an apple tree is one of the oldest subjects in painting: Adam and Eve. In this version, nobody reaches for the fruit. They already have everything they want. She has found it right here, with her eyes closed; he is looking ahead to the future they will share.
The red of the apples
Look up, and the branches are full of ripe apples in red and orange. Then look back at the couple: their lips are painted in exactly the same red as the apples above them. The fruit of the tree is already in the kiss.
Freedom below, precision above
The picture is built in two separate moves. First the ground: the green, yellow and turquoise background, the orange and violet of her top, the dark green and blue of his shirt and the blue of his hair, laid in with coarse, broad brushstrokes that settle nothing precisely. Then the drawing, on top of that ground: her closed eyes, his eyes glancing to the right, the red lips, the branches and the apples. The line never sinks into the paint; it stays on top. Like every figurative work in this series, the image is built forward, never scraped back — the exact inversion of the abstract series, where surfaces are built over months and cut back into.
Part of a group about couples
Apples joins Common Ground, Beso, Orbit and Nocturne in a group of 2026 paintings about couples. Each canvas shows a different moment of closeness: an afternoon, a kiss, a dance, a shared night — and here, an embrace under an apple tree.
An architect's scale
At 150 × 200 cm the two faces are larger than life. Bertermann, who holds a Master's degree in Architecture, uses that scale to bring the viewer right under the branches, close enough to share the shade of the tree.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Apples is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The loose branches, the running colour, the two faces drawn in a few sure strokes — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human hand working fast in front of a canvas two metres wide.
Apples, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 150 × 200 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.
This painting belongs to Claus Bertermann’s 2026 figurative series — large-format works in acrylic and oil stick in which the drawn layer always lies on top of the paint, never in it.