Vegetable Orchestra

Round 1
Image 1 — "Veggie Symphony Gone Wild" : 3.35
Wild is not the same as orchestrated. The spotlight, the wet stage taking the purple, the leaves coming down like confetti — the lighting is the best thing here, and it is spent on a crowd with no shape, every player at a different scale and the eye given nowhere to rest. The conductor also breaks the picture's own logic: a man in a dinner jacket wearing a vegetable for a head, standing among performers who are vegetables all the way down.

Image 2 — "Orchestra of Fresh and healthy music" : 3.55
The right idea handed to the wrong hands. Staging the joke in a real philharmonic hall and playing it dead straight is the second-best thought in the round — the balconies, the seated orchestra behind, the audience heads in the dark, all convincingly built. But the four soloists the whole room exists to frame are costumes rather than creatures, and the great squash they lean on never resolves into an instrument, so a photoreal hall ends up hosting a fancy-dress party.

Image 3 — "Veggie Philharmonic" : 3.75
The obvious answer, executed better than obvious answers usually are. The conductor seen from behind is the true concert view, the sections sit where a real orchestra puts them, and the instruments are properly drawn — valves on the brass, scrolls and f-holes on the strings — which is exactly where pictures like this normally fall apart. What it never does is surprise: this is precisely the image the theme produces on first reading, warmly lit and well staged, and the row of vegetables along the bottom edge is filler standing where an idea could have gone.

Image 4 — "music dissolves in time" : 4.00
The only entrant who heard the theme instead of reading it. Everyone else drew vegetables holding instruments; this one asked what music actually does — it decays — and painted a violin sagging off the corn's shoulder like a watch off a branch. The setting earns the conceit: a cracked sulphur plain with real aerial perspective, spires at the horizon, and radishes crossing the sky with their leaves for wings, which is the strangest and best invention of the day. It is also the only picture here with a surface — glazed shadow, oil handling, a palette of ochre and dust — rather than a render's polish. The corn's bowing hand is vague and the tomato's face is coarse, but this is a painting where the others are illustrations. My winner.