Natalie Rodgers
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Just Some Fruits and Vegetables

7/29/2012

5 Comments

 
I have been reading a little bit about the genre of still life lately--how throughout history it has tended to focus on mundane and overlooked objects while negating the human form. In the early 1600s, it was pretty avant-garde for a painting's sole subject matter to be a few fruits and vegetables rather than the portrait of a king or the depiction of a historical scene. 

Today, ironically, I think still life itself has become overlooked or maybe just associated too much with academic art. It brings to mind impersonal and sometimes tedious beginning drawing assignments of stacks of boxes and other unrelated odds and ends. There's something amazing, though, about the concentrated seeing involved in drawing one of these still lifes or in viewing a still life. One of my favorite paintings is Juan Sánchez Cotán's Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber from about 1600 pictured below:
Picture
What I really love about this painting is its geometrical composition and the simplicity of the forms suspended in front of a dark void. Because of this, I concentrate only on the objects as my eye travels back and forth on the graceful curve created by the alignment of the forms in space. Something as simple as a few fruits and vegetables can incite a sense of discovery and interest when looked at closely in a particular arrangement. 

The art historian Norman Bryson brings up some intriguing points about this sense of discovery and concentrated seeing when viewing Cotán's still lifes: "Sight is taken back to a vernal stage before it learned how to scotomise the visual field, how to screen out the unimportant and not see, but scan. In place of the abbreviated forms for which the world scans, Cotán supplies forms that are articulated at immense length...Just at the point where the eye thinks it knows the form and can afford to skip, the image proves that in fact the eye had not understood at all what it was about to discard" (Page 65 of Bryson's Looking at the Overlooked).

As much as I look at this painting, my eye continues to return to the round quince depicted in the upper left of the canvas and follow the curve down and up again, down and up, as if there is an infinite number of times in seeing it anew, yet it is always the same painting.
5 Comments
Pam Howell
7/30/2012 10:02:36 am

My focus seems to be on the black background...weird, huh?

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Natalie Rodgers link
7/31/2012 02:43:39 am

It's interesting that you say that...now when I look at the black space, I get sucked into it too...the objects kind of frame the negative space well...I think I've been looking at it too much!

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mona
8/31/2012 06:56:42 am

Time Magazine has a blurb about Israeli artist, Ori Gersht. He has a similar still life but the fruit is blown up in slow motion on video. It is showing at the Boston MFA. He says his goal is to fuse the sublime and the savage, reinventing classic still lifes for the modern era.

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Natalie Rodgers link
8/31/2012 11:36:08 am

Thanks Mom! I will look him up.

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Bradley link
9/18/2021 12:47:19 pm

Appreciate your bllog post

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