 What does the title 'A Still Life' stand for? A still life, the series of still lifes is about a longing for stillness, for slowing down, a 'different' way of looking than the trance of scrolling through pervasive images, coming home to ourselves in the wide open space of our deepest layers. From where the beauty of the world gently reveals itself to us, the elegance of the fragile life that we all, each of us, weave together with the objects we touch, our dreams, memories, desires, hopes and relations. It even feels a bit rebellious to spend that much time quietly observing these objects, making time stand still while the world races on in chaos.
In her poem 'This Big Fake World," Ada Limón writes about it in this fragile way: The object is to not simply exist in this world of radio clock and moon pies, where holidays and lunch breaks bring the only relief from the machine that is our mind humming inside of its shell. Shouldn’t we make a fire out of everyday things, build something out of too many nails and not wonder if we are right to build without permission from the other dull furniture? Out of this small plot we are given, small plot of cement and electrified wires, small plot of razors and outlandish liquor names, let’s make a nest, each of us, of our own pieces of glass and weeds and names we have found. Somewhere along the banks of this liquid world let all of us hold close to the lost and the unclear, and, in our own odd little way, find some refuge here. These paintings are based on A Still Life, 4, The Kitchen Sink, a start of a series of iterations towards more and more abstraction a bit like images fade and distort in our memories. That's how my mind works anyway. All iterations are 30 by 30 cm, oil on canvas board. I worked on these first iterations during Zoey Frank's course, "Breaking the Space". |
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