still...life?

I totally abhorred the dreaded still lifes in drawing and painting classes. They were boring and horrible but nevertheless a great teaching tool to study light/shadows, to learn shapes and forms and to hone your skills on learning to really look at and "see" objects.

I remember having a class with a girl that was sooo good at looking and then mimicking real life objects. They looked so real! She was kind of snotty but I admired her abilities. My still lifes definitely resembled the objects but were not always super great.

For those of you who are wondering what I'm talking about, wikipedia gives the definition:  A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on).

Some teachers are pretty innovative when it comes to the increasingly boring world of still lifes. I had one grad student teacher who created one out of a lot of edible things. There were peeps and various hardened easter candies, bowls of beans among other things. He also had us bring in exotic fruits to add to the display. Sometimes there were crumpled up paper bags (um, that's hard to draw) and always various linens with stripes, floral or other hideous patterns. One of the most torturous ones I remember was a bunch of different colored translucent glass vases on this blue and white striped cloth. Yuck.

Sadly, I have nothing left to show you from my still life days because I either painted over them or cut up the canvases to do collage work on other paintings. One of my first successful turns into the world of abstract art was this "still life" I chose to do in a painting course. I did cut up old apples from an oil painting class and turned a vase and other pieces around backwards and then painted over them to create the objects. I still love this painting, it's one of my absolute favorites and I got an excellent critique. It's funny to me, I think my work has gotten progressively better since the time I painted this but I still feel like it stands out as a really beautiful piece.

I decided that I liked my abstract take on a still life so one night when I was bored and wanting to paint something different I just so happened to have some lovely square canvases and lots of fun scraps...I made these. I decided they needed a new name so they are now known as life stills, the alternate universe of the still life.