Common Ground (2026) — Nobody Reaches for the Fruit

A young couple under a fruit tree. In Western painting that sentence has only ever had one ending. Somebody reaches up, somebody takes, and everything after that is consequence.

So count the fruit in Common Ground. More than fifteen of them, ripe, orange, drawn in loose scribbled rings, hanging within easy reach on every branch the blue tree puts out. Nobody is reaching. Nobody has even looked up.

A condition, not a story

The two of them sit facing forward, out of the picture, at whoever is standing in front of it — her eyes level and steady, his slightly narrowed. Both are entirely uninterested in the one prop the scene was supposed to be about. The fruit is not the offer in this painting. The fruit is the weather.

Detail of Common Ground (2026) by Claus Bertermann - ripe orange fruits drawn as scribbled rings in oil stick on a cobalt blue branch, hanging directly beside the blue-haired head of the seated figure against a field of yellow and orange

The event is below the shoulders

Follow the line between the two figures downward. At the faces they are unmistakably two people: two skin tones, two heads of hair, hers green-black, his cobalt blue. At the collar the boundary starts to fail. By the chest there is one shared mass of orange, crimson and dark green. By the lap there is no second body left to find.

That is also the title. Common Ground is not a metaphor about agreement. It is a description of the lower half of this canvas — the place where two people stop being two, painted as exactly that and nothing more polite.

Detail of Common Ground (2026) by Claus Bertermann - the two faces, pale yellow-green and drawn in cobalt blue oil stick with almond eyes and orange mouths, her green-black hair against his cobalt blue hair, an orange halo behind them and the blue branch of the fruit tree passing above

The tree is made of the same material they are

The trunk, the branches and the drawn contours of both faces are laid down with the same cobalt blue oil stick, by the same hand, in the same gesture. The tree is not scenery behind the couple. It grows out of the ground they share — which is the only version of paradise this painting is willing to offer, and, on balance, the better one.

Under the drawing, the paint is doing something else entirely. The yellow light, the orange field behind the heads and the broad teal band at the left are laid in first, in coarse, broad brushstrokes that settle nothing precisely and keep the movement of the arm visible. The drawing arrives afterwards and sits on top of that ground, cutting across it instead of following it. Freedom below, precision above, and no scraping back — the image is built forward, like every figurative work in this series. Collectors who know the abstract series will recognise the inversion: there the surface is built over months and cut back into; here the line is laid on top and stays there.

An architect's scale

At 240 cm across, the tree stands close to life size. The fruit hangs at the height it would hang at in an orchard, and the two figures meet a standing viewer at eye level. The painting does not illustrate the encounter. It stages it in the room.

Made by a real person — not AI

Like every work in the studio, Common Ground is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The running colour, the scribbled rings, the black lattice across the lower third — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human body working fast in front of a canvas nearly two and a half metres wide.

Common Ground, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 200 × 240 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.

→ View Common Ground in the gallery

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.