Artist Statement: Still Life

I am an artist who works from the live model or directly in the landscape. Drawing and painting a still life seems almost like cheating. You set it up, light it, and then, it never moves. It doesn’t want to talk to you. The wind doesn’t blow it away. At worst, the fruit rots, but then you can make like Cezanne and paint fake fruit. This can be enormously interesting and useful if, for instance, you want to explore technical issues; if you want to study an idealized form or play with colour or value or texture ideas; if you want to explore paint as paint.

Still life work can end up with an air of the pianist’s practice scales about it – impressive but ultimately uninteresting. The rigorously trained artists from Central Europe and Asia often suffer from this, whereas Jim Dine and Morandi never do. How do they avoid it? It is because they are not merely depicting objects. Instead they are using those objects, be they bottles or bathrobes, as tools to explore issues of space, mark, line, tone, material. Rather than ‘making paintings’, they are studying and discovering aspects of the world and putting their discoveries on the canvas for us to see. What they arrive at is always interesting, and I learn from them and others like them.