STILL LIFE PAINTINGS
Like it or not, art is fundamentally imitative, a truth usually kept in the closet that still-life cannot help revealing. I have been consistantly drawn to the art of still-life from the later sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries, their air of scientific examination and analysis, of the artist exploring and describing the separate wonders of each plum or snail remains particularly fascinating to me. At one time all the physical sciences -- from anatomy, zoology, botany and ornithology to metallurgy, mineralogy, geology, and astronomy -- often depended upon the artist's capacity to comprehend and record the structure below the surface. This is still true today for example in medical research, where so many findings defy photography and call for the special understanding of the artist.
Still-life paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are loaded with a rich iconography that is alien to the modern viewer. When Leonardo wrote, "Every artist paints himself", though his profound observation was more towards portraiture than any other genre, so still-life, too, takes us to the personal by indirection; so many suggestions of self, of desire, of fear, and of hope concealed within what's scattered on a tabletop. The seeming neutrality of an object, depicted with a spurious sense of objectivity, may yet be the unreflecting mirror of our passions, betraying or affirming the "what" and "who" of the artist's character.
Now, in the opening years of the twenty first century does still-life have anything to say to us? Today still-life can seem to be comfortably irrelevant -- serene, quiet, experiences of pure beauty and perfect order in an increasingly aesthetically discordant and emotionally harsh world. Yet perhaps this is what we admire most about them. I hope these simple paintings might encourage the viewer to stop and look a little more closely at a world often overlooked in the headlong rush of modern life.
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