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Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), Still Life with Flowers,
Bowl of Fruit and Pitcher, 1865, Oil on Canvas, The Hermitage, St.
Petersburg, Russia
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Georges Daniel de Monfreid (1856-1929), Still Life with Oranges,
1903, Oil on Board, 23 by 32 1/4 in., Private Collection
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If you are forced to primarily focus on painting still lifes
for one reason or another, you’ve got a big inspiration problem to deal
with. I’ve met many painters over the
years who just won’t paint still lifes on a regular basis. Some just keep enrolling in art school
classes so they can paint portrait and figure models year
after year at relatively low cost.
It is innately more interesting and
exciting to paint the human figure or a babbling brook in a sylvan
landscape than a coffee pot and two apples. And after a couple of years
of painting mostly still lifes, you get pretty sick of your own setups. Attempting to arrange the same pots and pans
and fruits and vegetables and dreary flowers from the local markets in a novel
way can make you physically ill, if not suicidal. Of course, if you enjoy painting
photographically every tile on the wall of a subway station or every detail of
an old sewing machine, I guess inspiration is of no great concern to you.
Fortunately, there were many fabulous still life painters from
past generations whose work is so inspiring that it gives me the strength to
carry on within the genre that fate has cruelly thrust upon me. I know of one guy who paints retro Dutch Old
Master still lifes with a fair amount of precision, but without the astounding
brushwork finesse of his 17th and 18th century role models. He gets big bucks for his carefully composed
paintings, which include rare and expensive objects that he has the chutzpah to
borrow from the owners. I can’t imagine
anyone loaning me anything of value or of interest to put in my still lifes.
Now, for my own amusement and absolution, I’m going to
fasten my seat belt to describe a little series of paintings I’ve created over
the past couple of weeks that were based on elements in two still life
paintings that I think are masterpieces.
One is by Fantin-Latour and the other is by Georges Daniel de Monfreid
(1856-1929), a friend and follower of Gauguin.
Both paintings include a wine decanter similar to one I have
in my possession. Mine has an etched
fruit design that I was unable to discern from my vantage point. Fantin painted his decanter without its
stopper and de Monfreid with it. I did
versions both ways, but I preferred painting my decanter with its stopper, even
though its muted transparency presented many rendering problems.
Fantin included in his still life a beautiful red-lacquer
tray that looks like it would be far more interesting to paint than any trays I
have. I used a tray overlaid with a Carl
Larsson picnic scene for my first painting.
I was disappointed that my setup prevented me from identifying it as
such. For my second painting I included
a silver-plated art deco tray that I had been using for years as a base for
some jars of turpentine and painting mediums.
I had to clean the tray and touch up with oil paint (crudely) some of
the chipped off-white enamel on the handles. I’m sorry now I didn’t take better care of
this lovely tray. Both paintings were
based solely on Fantin’s painting.
I loved the way Fantin arranged his orange segments and a
cut open pomegranate. He sensitively captured
the exact same juicy fullness that one observes in atmospheric space when
painting from life by natural light, something I’ve never quite been able to
accomplish. I did a mediocre job on my
orange slices and didn’t know how to cut open my pomegranate, so just used it
whole in the pedestal bowl a couple of times.
However, I was competent enough to slice a red grapefruit the long way
and used it in a few of my paintings because I felt that the halves were interesting
and lovely in both color and design.
Fantin’s potted plant, with its irregularly spaced small
white blossoms and fulsome leaves, anchors his composition so perfectly. I went out and bought some really boring mums
for $5 from a local shop for my second painting. There are millions of people living in New
York City and hundreds of flower shops, but you can’t
find the flowers that Fantin painted anywhere.
And as one of Fantin’s female students told him, “I already know how to
paint. I came here to learn how to
arrange flowers,” or words to that effect. I used the mums in a couple of rather insipid
ways and bought some wilted, out-of-season sunflowers from Trader Joe’s for one
painting.
The paintings by Fantin and de Monfreid both feature a
pedestal bowl holding some fruit. Fantin’s
finely crafted bowl is quite elegant and he painted it superbly. I saw the de Monfreid painting in a Sotheby’s
London auction catalog some years
ago and loved the bowl shape so much that I actually commissioned a potter exhibiting
at the local flea market to make a somewhat similar one for me.
I’m in love with de Monfried’s design, color scheme and the
way he captured the truth to nature, just as Fantin did, in the objects he
included in his painting, especially the empty wine glass and decanter. I didn’t have a red plate to place under my
decanter, so I had to make do with the white plate, which I normally use to
hold the varnish when I varnish my paintings.
De Monfried’s draped table inspired me to add a lady’s scarf in my last
four paintings in this series. The scarf
is not nearly as beautiful as his blue cloth, which complements his oranges so
well. But I had fun analyzing the squares
of the scarf in perspective and mixing its colors, which were attractive
combinations of raw umber, yellow ochre, a touch of alizarin, white and black.
I really love Fantin’s warm, dusty yellow ochre background
and charcoal gray foreground. A couple
of drapes I possess matched those colors and I’ll use them more in the future
because the colors are so easy to mix and so harmonious – yellow ochre, raw
umber, maybe a little cadmium red light or alizarin, white and black. Happy is the painter who hits on a harmonious
color combination for his still lifes that is easy to mix and pleasing to look
at.
Both paintings I used for inspiration were painted from a
vantage point well below eye level. I
normally paint my still life setups from a vantage point just a little below
eye level while standing at my easel, so this was an interesting departure for
me, and I hope to be doing more paintings with this viewpoint in the
future. One advantage to this approach is
I can lower my window shades to get more light into my dreary home studio and
still get a fairly decent high angle of light on the objects I’m painting.
Now, about those ellipses or ovals. Ellipses are always challenging to paint, but
fun as well. Some painters paint almost all
their cylindrical objects at eye level to avoid dealing with the ellipses. Some always obscure one outside curve of the
rim or base of a pot or bowl by placing another object in front of it. And looking down on bowls and things
accentuates these ellipses. This leaves you with a
curious illusion to deal with when painting them in a still life from a fixed
vantage point, because unless you are standing directly in front of a bowl, for
example, the ellipses always look a little lopsided. Painting all the objects with ellipses in
your still life wherever they are located as if they are perfectly symmetrical
as seen from directly in front of them is one way to solve the problem, I guess. But that's not being true to nature. Maybe ellipses are not as big a problem
for traditional painters as you might think when the entire painting is otherwise
close to the truth in color and atmospheric effects. Most of my ellipses exhibit lopsidedness to some
degree, I’m afraid. I’ve never been good
at painting perfectly symmetrical objects.
It takes quite a bit of concentration on these lopsided ovals for me to
get them to look right in space from their respective positions across the
picture plane. You
know what – I’m giving myself the impression that I don’t know what I’m talking
about. And I may be right! Let’s move on.
Some of my paintings in this series were done over old ones,
so they didn’t photograph very well.
They look so much better in real life, trust me. But my paintings, and those of all painters
working today in the realist tradition, seem to lack the comfortable certainty
of human vision shown in the two paintings created by Fantin and de
Monfreid. We no longer trust our eyes
alone to analyze and interpret nature. Our
view of the natural world has been corrupted by constant exposure to
high-definition digital tomfoolery. There
is no turning back to those days of visual innocence enjoyed by all the great painters
of the past whose work inspires us to paint the same things they did.
So that’s more than enough “texting” on this low-budget painting
excursion inspired by my two friends, Fantin and de Monfreid. They got me started. All I had to do was move things around a bit. Now I can throw away all the rotting fruit
and think about what to paint next. I
believe I narrowly escaped going to the dark side of the old adage, “To borrow
from one painter is stealing; to borrow from many is research.” But I'm wrong about a lot of things and I may be wrong about that, too.
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| Couldn't resist adding one more to the series. Now I'm free again! |
