Fruit Platter, 1975, Gachot's earliest work, was inspired by a wedge of wood spotted beside the LIE service road. Gachot picked it up, thinking it looked like a piece of watermelon, and painted it red and green. Placing it with additional carved and painted fruit on a wooden platter, he created an image of abundance reminiscent of the first generation of American still life artists—painters like the Peale family but also decorative artists whose works in ceramic or metal were often used as centerpieces, just as this carved-wood piece generally is, on Gachot’s dining-room table. In its rediscovery of agrarian plentitude in a wedge from a felled tree, Fruit Platter suggests a yearning for Long Island’s orchards and vanished way of life felt by the artist decades before the rise of farm-to-table and local organic farming.

​

— Franklin Hill Perrell, from "Richard Gachot: An American Original"