Still Life with Black-eyed Susan. Acrylic on Canvas. 40” x 30". 2021.
I didn’t expect to be painting still lives this summer. I had plenty of ideas for other subjects, motifs that reflected my thoughts about mortality, purpose and time. So how did I get involved painting still lives?
Paintings have a way of being born without my permission or knowledge. They happen as I work and watch them evolve. So when a still live emerged out of another painting, I just thought it was a moment on the way to something else.
But the still life refused to go away. Try arguing with a painting. Since you are fighting yourself, you can’t win. I just went with the flow.
The painting knew how to survive: it made itself really difficult. I love difficulties so I got hooked. I also realized that I hadn’t painted a still life in years. When I first picked up a brush, I painted still lives. The subject matter, oranges, apples, plants and books, were readily available. My favorite artists painted still lives: Cezanne, Soutine, Matisse, Picasso. What better way to apprentice myself?
That was fifty years ago, and in the interim I struggled to define myself, to find the images that gave voice to my thoughts and concerns. I gave up still life painting because I didn’t understand how it could allow me the freedom I was searching for.
That was then. Now I am finding a subtle freedom in painting still lives. I am concentrating on composition, line and color, the fundamentals of drawing and painting.
In still lives, expression is more indirect. What colors are chosen, what fruits or objects are used, the overall structure of the painting are clues to the artist’s state-of-mind. It is said that there is a universe in a Cezanne apple. If you are an artist, these are good problems to have.
So far, I’ve completed three or four still life paintings. The process isn’t any more harrowing than I fare normally, it’s just unfamiliar. I can never tell when a painting will give me a lot of trouble. You get used to uncertainty. I don’t know how many still lives I will do or where it will take me. I don’t care.
This is why I call myself an artist.