The Return of Still Life

This painting is inspired by Sadie Valeri's use of wax paper in her still lifes. In this case, I used the green florist paper that the rose came in.

The challenge with still life is to produce something that resembles what we actually see. Many people are unable to simply be in the moment and see what is actually there. We "know" that the edge of an object is hard and we paint that exact and strong edge, but the truth is, we actually only see a hard edge when we directly look at a very small portion of reality that is before us. Edges attract attention. We flit from edge to edge and as we flit, each edge comes into exact focus. If you want to see what I mean, it is easy enough and you may simply say, "Duh!", but it bears examining. Find an object within a few feet (2-5 ft.) and stare at a hard edge. Make it a boundary edge that defines the break between the object and the space behind it. Keeping your focus on that edge, notice how blurry the background is--the deeper the background, the more blurry. Another simple fact is that we are binocular creatures who have eyes mounted an inch or so apart. Each eye sees a slightly different part of the world. To experience the difference, close one eye then rapidly open it and close the other alternating one to the other. You will see everything shift. Our brain stitches these two distinct images together to form a stereoscopic impression of the scene. I'm sure many of you have seen those stereoscopic viewers from the late 1800s and the Viewmaster, a stereoscopic toy from the sixties.

As a painter, my goal is to use this knowledge of how the eyes and brain work in order to create a scene that makes your eye and brain do what I want it to do. If I make every edge sharp, I will create ten thousand points of interest. If I soften selectively, I can, like a magician forcing a card on you, make you see what I want you to see and what is of most interest in the painting (at least to me).

The use of edge techniques tells the brain that this image exists as a 3D object. There is some conflict, but the tendency is for the brain to default towards reality which is full of soft edges around the edge of our pin point interest. Hard edges everywhere keeps us on the surface of the painting.

The painting in this post is one of ten or so still life paintings which I did for show this month. These paintings are more or less sketches and could be far more detailed and far less detailed and sketchy and still be considered ready for the gallery. The consideration of why you go more detailed or less will be the subject of my next post.

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