Still Life Painting

• Part Two

The genre of Still-life could be divided up into several categories, according to their basic subject matter. For me, and the influence various Masters have had on my work, it can be divided up into three main categories:

• Those that appear as details in larger compositions.

• Those that were created as "one-offs" by artists whose oeuvres were dedicated ostensibly to subjects other than Still-Life.

• Those that were created by artists who devoted most of their lives or, as in my case, a serious portion of their lives, to the genre, most famously Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699 - 1799) whose work and its connection to mine has been shown in Part One, and Henri Fantin-Latour (1796 - 1875), each of whom had a considerable influence on my own still-life painting.

Apples and Flowers
Christian

Flowers and Fruit
Fantin Latour

Still Life
Melendez

Flowers
Breughel

Still-life painting covers all sorts of lovely fruits and veggies and not so organically living objects, pots and pans and what have you, and even musical or scientific instruments; it also covers flowers. Jan Brueghel painted so many magnificent flower pieces that he became known as "Blumen Brueghel," literally "Flower Brueghel." He sometimes worked on larger compositions with his friend Rubens; for example, they would paint an Adam and Eve together in which Rubens would paint the figures and Brueghel all the flowers and fauna. This is one of his marvellous flower paintings and one of mine, painted in New York in the 80's, when I went through my "Flower period." So much did I fall in love with flowers - I became absolutely obsessed with them - and so much did I want to paint so many of them, I even decided that instead of setting up a formal composition, and putting them into a vase placed on a table etc., I would simply cover my canvas with flowers. The (artistic) challenge that I was faced with in doing this was to create an almost abstract sense of balance with my colours. You might think that any amount of any colour placed side by side would look fine, but in fact as I looked at my works in progress I noticed that there was often a lack of harmony or balance so subtle that I could hardly put my finger on it - let alone describe it! - but as I continued, conscious of that unease and so as a result adding a lot more red here, a little more yellow there, it would indeed suddenly slot into place, and completely please and satisfy my eye at last. Each one took weeks to complete and I painted about a dozen of them, including two that were approximately 50"x30" inches, and so I ended up spending a lot of time with flowers...oh, the wonderful perfumes that filled my studio in those days! And when I had finished them, I was so grateful to them and loathe to throw them out, that I hung the many bunches of them upside down to dry, all along the beams on my ceiling; I came to love my upside-down garden.

Flowers
Christian

Jeremiah
Rembrandt

So many artists have incorporated still-life as details in larger works, that it can be considered even a general practice. My two main Masters, the ones who inspired me the most and from whom I feel I learnt a large part of what I used in my painting for much of my life, Rubens and Rembrandt, did it all the time. Just look at those grapes in a Rubens painting, or that little bowl of treasures in Rembrandt's 'Jeremiah.' We are as used to seeing objects in the background of portraits just as we are used to being in a room talking with a friend at the same time as there are likely to be half a dozen still-lifes in that same room, that we will probably not even notice: a vase of flowers, a plate and some cutlery, or some clothes thrown in a bundle in the corner. An artist's gift is the ability to raise the mundane to the higher planes of Art, and this is basically what the greatest of still-life painters have done. I believe that the very genre of Still-life has raised people's consciousness in noticing the things around them, or even seeing them in perhaps a different way. I have lost count of the number of people who, on seeing my paintings of fruit, have said to me that they would "never look at fruit again in the same way!"

It would be impossible to mention grand masterworks in which the artist has incorporated a little still-life detail so irresistible that we not only notice it, we love it, almost as a separate little painting, without mentioning Velasquez (1599 - 1660). Although I admire his works as a whole, I find the still-life details in them often so extraordinarily brilliantly painted I consider them as some of the greatest examples of the genre that I know. Just look at that glass and those pots in "The Waterseller," those objects to the left of "Two Men at Table," the fried eggs in "Old Woman Cooking," and finally the fish and eggs in "Christ in the House of Mary and Martha," and see how that latter had an influence on me over the years.

Still Life from Jeremiah
Rembrandt

Pestle and Mortar
Christian

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha
Velasquez

Fish
Christian

Another point I wish to make about Velasquez is the wonderful Impressionistic manner with which he worked. A good example would be the little vase of flowers in the portrait of the "Infanta Margarita". That detail is such a great example of Impressionism. I show it to you next to a Manet of a similar subject. Isn't it amazing to think that the Velasquez was painted some 200 years before the Manet? How could anyone look at the comparison and not see where Impressionism came from?

Infanta Margarita (Detail)
Velasquez

Roses
Manet