Still Life Painting
• An Introduction to Still Lifes
Still-life painting is the fascination artists have with inanimate objects which, for whatever reason, touches them enough to make them wish to communicate or express their feelings towards these objects and share those feelings with the viewer. I have often looked at things ranging from incredible fruits to elaborate swaths of lace and responded to them with amazed admiration, exclaiming "Look at that!" Every one of my still-life paintings might have borne that same title; I painted each one simply to share that intense reaction with whoever might look at my expression of that excitement in paint.
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| Still Life Doorframe
Christian |
While it is generally assumed that the genre of still-life was started by the Dutch or Flemish of the 15th and 16th centuries, as they simply did so much of it, the fact is that the first still-lifes are to be found on the walls of villas in Pompeii, painted in the first century A.D. Everything then went pretty quiet for a thousand years or so while we evolved through what is known as the Dark Ages. Still-life painting then appears in the first half of the 14th century, in Italy, where the idea of reviving ideas of antiquity inspired the genre into existence. Even landscape and other subjects appeared there at that time, which were eventually to develop into independent branches of art. It was about a hundred years later that the Flemings and the Dutch became prolific exponents of the still-life, to the point where most people imagined that they had started it. The Northerners remained the greatest exponents of the genre until Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin created an oeuvre full enough of the most beautiful and innovative still-lifes for the mantle to be held by France, where it remained to be taken to new heights by the Impressionists and finally the moderns, who took it into areas where it could only be described as no longer recognisable. It has been kept alive by Surrealists however; Dali painted not many, but enough to keep the genre breathing, as did Magritte and various other members of that movement. I, more by chance than conscious decision, gave sixteen years of passion to it and believe that I have made a contribution. Still life is definitely still alive.
My own forays into Still-life Painting could be likened to someone who has a slight fear of water and who is extremely cold anyway, stepping gingerly into a swimming pool. I put my toes in the water for the first time in 1966 when, in Rome, I painted the Thai-silk hat and exotic Indian sandals of my then wife. I painted them simply because they were the two most unusual objects that I saw constantly lying around that had a degree of sentiment surrounding them, being so personally belonging to her. It was a small painting, probably about 10"x16", and I enjoyed the single day it took me to paint as I then enjoyed the results of my work. When I put it in my first exhibition in 1969, it sold on the opening night. My next foray into the genre wasn't until 1972, in London. During my most intense period up until then of trying to truly master the art of Painting to the degree that I had already mastered Drawing, one day out of the blue I gathered together a few objects that I enjoyed seeing around often, bundled them together on a small table and sat down and painted them. Once again I enjoyed enormously doing so, but still didn't get the message that here was a subject that was a perfectly reasonable alternative to portraiture with which I was then involved and through which I earned my living . Through the erratic behaviour of vain and spoilt clients, something experienced by virtually every portraitist from Rembrandt to date, I suffered greatly but was saved eventually by turning to Still life. I lost my little '72 Still-life and was delighted by it when I came across it more than twenty years later. I titled it "The Little Still-Life."
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Little Still Life
Christian |
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Il Cavolo
Christian
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 Gourd and Slippers
Christian
 The Pine Cone>
Christian
The Supper at Emmaus
Caravaggio |
It was five years later, by which time I was living in Tuscany, that I painted my next still-life, which actually became famous throughout the region. We had people coming to the house - an ancient molino, water mill - constantly, asking to see "Il Cavolo d'Antonio!" I had painted a cabbage pulled from our own vegetable garden, whose leaves had impressed me greatly by being so like drapery, another genre with which I was already deeply involved. And so I took this magnificent cabbage up to my studio early the next morning and had to paint it in a single day as I realised the leaves would curl up after that. I enjoyed painting my cabbage ("cavolo" in Italian, and by me, thus "il cavolo d'Antonio," ) and loved the results but still didn't realise what an important genre still-life could be to me. And nor did I realise it when I painted what was almost my favourite painting of that year, the "Gourd and Slippers," for which I used a pair of slippers that had been given to me in in appreciation of my work, in Moscow, by Maya Plisetskaya. I also used a gourd that I had found in an African shop in Brussels some years before, whose form had so fascinated me I had acquired it with the express intention of painting it. I made two studies of it as I was fascinated by both its convex and concave aspects . I felt I achieved each to a degree that made me love the work, and the sentiment I felt for the slippers had caused me to paint those well too, I thought.
I see pine-cones as little jewels of Nature, and they have been a life-long passion of mine, causing me to collect many hundreds of them which always appear in baskets all over my house, wherever I may be living. Although whilst in Tuscany I also painted numerous studies of pine-cones, I didn't finally realise how important still-life painting was until the following year, 1978, when I was living in Paris. My consciousness of still-life up until then was somewhat limited. My ambition since I was very young was to paint large spectacular Imaginative Compositions, the genre that had once been called "History Painting." I therefore hardly noticed any paintings in the museums I visited outside the magnificent examples of this genre, usually by Rubens or Rembrandt. I had however always been aware of a most beautiful example of still-life, the feast laid out before Christ in the Caravaggio painting of "The Supper at Emmaus," in the National Gallery where I had worked, studying by copying, from 1955 - 1960. But an awareness of that detail caused me all the more to think of still-life as only ever being used as a detail in a larger composition.
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Still Life from The Supper at Emmaus
Caravaggio |
 Mannequin and Basket
Christian |
Living in Paris in 1978, I visited the Grand Palais, where they periodically hold the most magnificent shows of the entire oeuvre of some of the great artists in our history. That fact alone had an enormous influence on how I lived my artistic life, saving as I did as much of my work as possible for my own museum (The Ichor Collection). On this first occasion I went to see an exhibition of the whole of Chardin's work. Seeing all those still-lifes at one time really impressed me and excited me enough to encourage me to start setting up one or two objects that I liked in my home and painting them. It wasn't long before I painted two little works, each of which took me just three to four hours, which I found so beautiful in a magical way that I became instantly committed to the genre of still life and then proceeded to paint probably about a thousand of them over the next sixteen years.
Lodged in my subconscious as the artist who had introduced me to the genre, Chardin probably remained an influence on my work, albeit only in the depths of my sub-conscious. After painting this "Vase of Flowers" I found later in a book, a work by Chardin in which I could see a certain similarity of vision and perhaps even of style in the two paintings.
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Laundry in Terracota Bowls
Christian
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A Vase of Flowers
Chardin
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A Vase of Flowers
Christian
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Saying Grace
Chardin |
Interestingly enough, although it was really Chardin who established the genre of still-life once and for all by adding a personal quality of intimacy to it that the Northerners hadn't really achieved yet, it was nevertheless his Genre pictures that touched me the most. The actual branch in art called Genre Painting means "scenes of everyday life," and Chardin's scenes were so beautiful and expressive, they held for me a charm I had only seen before in the work of Jan Vermeer; I even preferred them to the still-lifes. However, it was definitely Chardin who first made me realise the degree to which Still-Life could be a subject all on its own, which could both please me as an artist, painting some of the wonderful little objects I was surrounded by that I had always loved but extraordinarily enough had never actually considered painting, and it could delight the public who were my patrons. No sooner had I started than I became so inspired I couldn't stop, and that kind of almost obsessive passion continued for sixteen years, until I finally felt that I had actually made a contribution to the genre of Still-life, and began working on the long dreamed of Compositions.
 Still Life Paintings, Part Two
Anthony Christian
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