The Still Life as Literature

Among the hierarchies that governed European painting for centuries, the still life sat near the bottom. History paintings depicted great events and great souls; portraits commemorated the notable living; landscapes spoke of God's creation and human contemplation of it. Fruit bowls and skulls and flowers wilting in pewter vases — these were a lower business, technically impressive perhaps, but morally minor.

I've always thought this assessment has it backwards.

Consider what the still life actually does. It assembles ordinary objects — bread, a candle, an open book, a glass of wine — and asks us to look at them as though for the first time. It argues that the everyday is worth sustained attention; that the texture of a lemon's rind, the particular way light falls through a cracked shutter, contain as much meaning as any coronation or battle.

This is a profoundly literary sensibility. The great novelists — Flaubert, Woolf, Chekhov — were obsessed with the significance of ordinary objects and the way they accumulate feeling over time. Emma Bovary's wedding cake. The lighthouse lamp. The documents on Chekhov's desks that always seem to contain someone's whole life compressed into paper.

The Dutch vanitas tradition made this connection most explicit. A skull beside an hourglass beside a half-eaten meal: the objects speak to each other, build an argument about time and loss and what we choose to surround ourselves with. It is an essay in paint. The best still lifes I know — Chardin's kitchen interiors, Morandi's bottles, Giorgio Morandi's bottles — feel like paragraphs from long, serious books about being alive.

When I arrange objects in the studio, I'm thinking about what they mean in relation to each other: what story the arrangement tells, what mood the selection creates. It feels more like writing than I usually admit.