Mark Hedges is Editor-in-chief of COUNTRY LIFE

In 2019, I had never heard of Eliot Hodgkin, but this extraordinary image of peeled lemons was on the Art Editor’s computer screen as I walked through the COUNTRY LIFE office. I was transfixed. The ordinary had been made extraordinary. A complete rethink to that week’s front cover ensued and, although I eventually chose one of his remarkable paintings of strawberries for that honour, it was the lemons with their spirals of peel that have continued to astonish. There is something meditative in the simplicity of the fruit and the twists and turns the peel has taken