. The Cabinet of Dr. Verb-Ops Still Life with Asso…
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Still Life with Associations
I’ve been painting a lot of still life this year. I set up the motif on a wooden desktop that I hammered together using pine boards back in Maplewood, where my studio was up in the eaves of the old house on F
ranklin Avenue. These days, I work in a comparably-sized space in the basement, tucked behind the stairs. The one advantage to the basement studio is having a sink right there—I often wondered in Maplewood if we’d ever manage to sell the house with its paint trail leading from the attic to the basement.
I guess I’m like most painters when it comes to still life subjects. I have my favorites. I keep them in a metal cabinet on the wall downstairs when they aren’t in play on the desktop or on loan to a shelf in the dining room or living room. I have a lot of what I generally call vessels—iron kettles, a brass spittoon, a long-spout aluminum watering can. I have a hookah and a rubber chicken. Then there are the anthromorphs—a yellow Toby mug from England, a monkey Toby, a wooden monk, a gargoyle from Paris, a turtle head (reptomorph?), and my all-important plaster skull from New Orleans. These “face cards” are the lead players.
And the play is the thing…unless the thing is a mountain. Of the three standard representational genres—portraiture, landscape, and still life—still life is the one in which the artist creates nature before representing it on canvas. I go about setting a stage most times–a theater of the absurd with lead actors and bit players, but without a purely objective, linear narrative. Or, I build Mont Sainte Victoire. Either way, I create a world that says something to me in that wordless, subjective/objective language that pulls me to art.
Lately, I have been thinking about my still life players. Each of them, it seems, has an association, a story. I never really think of these stories when I’m painting—the paintings would end up big story stews if I did, given that I like to pile items up on the table. But on some level, these histories and association must inform the paintings. It might be worth it to give them some thought and sort them out.
Vanx
