The Still Life

It’s just so still…

So i guess my main topic of conversation this week will be what the title suggests: the concept of a still life painting. Obviously my inspiration for this topic comes from our guest speaker this week, Ron Graff. He is a very classically trained, skillful, experimental painter (the reason I say experimental is due to his recent excursion into the world of abstract painting. I may not be the biggest fan of these works, but I can still appreciate the effort). This is also how i generally feel about still life paintings from most artists. I appreciate what he’s doing because I assume he paints for one reason: because he loves to do it. If an artist is doing what they do for that sole purpose, I can always stand behind it. It’s just this whole art for art’s sake thing that we have been talking about. Ron Graff can’t be painting those scenes with a noble message in mind… right? Can apples and flowers save us from this crisis that the human race is in??! Is making art enough anymore?! Okay now I’m just making fun of Suzi Gablik…

Don’t get me wrong, I really like the stuff, and i appreciate the things that it has caused me to think about on my own. For example, I loved the bit about how the flowers in his paintings were all from different times of the year, and couldn’t exist in real life because they don’t really all bloom at the same time. Like some sort of magic, imaginary, dream bouquet that we will never get to experience in real life. The only way to represent it is through some wort of magical power – a painting. During that section in my art history course last year we learned about this phenomenon and has stuck with me ever since. Another thing i liked about the presentation was his playful attitude and general feeling that it’s silly to try to define what art is. He said it was crazy to try to figure out who thought what was and wasn’t art because everyone has their own opinion on the matter and there is no way to figure out who gets to be right or wrong. But i guess what i’m trying to get at is this: I appreciate what he is doing, I think it’s pretty, and I know it’s fun to paint still lifes, but I’m just simply not inspired by it.

I may not be inspired by it, but I do like it. Does that make sense? Is that possible? I think so. Because it’s happening. This is the main connection to the reading that I can make this week, even though it may be a little pathetic. I feel the same way about the reading as I do about Graff’s work: I like it, but no inspiration there. I feel like the two artists interviewed were not saying anything I haven’t heard before. Just like Graff wasn’t painting anything I haven’t seen before.

Sorry.

Ps. Do pictures of really cool houses/churches count as still lifes? Because I like those…