Beautiful still life

Wayne Thiebaud

When I paint something beautiful I am trying to capture that sense of wonder at the beauty I see. If I paint a landscape my painting has to convert that beauty into another material; from light, wind, scents, distance and so many things into a pigment suspended in some medium that will reflect light when placed on a flat surface.

Creating the illusions of depth, distance and mood help, and composition conjures up mysterious feelings that we can’t quite grasp.  The physical presence of paint is attractive in the impasto of oil paint but also in the tide marks that watercolour leaves behind, so the painting begins to build its own beautiful presence that can separate itself from the original inspiration.

The mystery of a Claude Lorain mythological landscape was maybe many people’s first view of Rome or the Italian landscape and became a sort of visual reference, so now nature itself was manipulated to resemble art, like in a picturesque Victorian folly for example.

The idea of painting influencing the world around us can be seen in the way paintings are chosen to help create a room’s character through its overall colour or design.  We may want our painting to express many things, but in painting we can only speak through the language of colour and composition.

What separates still life from other genres of painting, such as portraiture or landscape is that we have much more control over the subject matter, what it is and how its placed, although the drama of the subject matter may not be as compelling as a storm at sea or a self-portrait.

A Morandi still life seems very much its own thing.  Individually the colours and objects are quite plain and there is no attempt at giving the illusion of volume or surface texture like in a Dutch 17^th century still life.  The paintings though emit a clear atmosphere, which you may or may not like.

Some subject matter seems to have a direct echo in how the painting is created so that it becomes part of its identity.  Wayne Thiebauld, who learned his trade in advertising, painted rows of slices or pie (top of blog) that seemed to echo their nature by substituting a richness of paint for the sweet and satisfying model.