Adriaan Coorte
Looking closely at objects, examining their exact shape,
numerous details that distinguish them is what starts long, meandering process
of painting a still-life. Most people have very few memories of times taken
across their whole lives of paying that amount of focused attention on any
tangible object. Mostly their contact is momentary, fleeting, and cursory.
Usually on such occasions we look for something we already know about those
objects and seek confirmation of preexistent knowledge. But at times we do
intent to learn something yet obscure to us and for a satisfying moment a
frightful extend of our unfamiliarity with the world is revealed to us. This is
a wild, foreign territory stretching away from us in all directions. It is as
if we were standing at the bottom floor of an immense library with aisles of
books climbing endlessly beyond any conceivable horizons. Surely we will never
get to know the cogent content of even the nearest corner. We shall try, but
while trying, the provisional scaffolding of a few hasty certainties will sway
underneath our feet with the alarming sense that we should go back to the
beginning to make certain that what we know is actually true.
Painters of still-lifes and portraitists should be grouped
in the same guild, while landscape painters urban and sea-scape as well as
figure painters have a different approach, different optics. Painting a
still-life as if it was a landscape or painting a landscape or a figure as if
it was a still-life has been done in the rich past of art.
These two opposite tendencies are both in use by all
painters-distancing and proximating
elements in view, but harmonizing them tends to favor either
generalization or specificity.
Over some two centuries still-life genre enjoyed and
suffered voluminous commentaries regarding the “hidden meanings”, a secret
language woven into the very purposeful choices of objects in still-lifes.Very
often such texts are bristling with overwhelming erudition; indeed the wish to
display the authors erudition seems so
overpowering that nothing ,even the most unassuming crumb cannot escape lavish
exegesis that quotes Apocalypses, bawdy couplets, local
proverbs and secret books of alchemy. From some skeptical angle it seems often
as if Panurg had dictated these explanations to make fun of ponderous
scholastics. Nearly all of those books and articles are in stated or silently
obvious polemic with other texts on the still-life subject and are about texts
– not about actual effects of contemplating still-life in question. The idea
that a painter depicted lovingly three peaches on a marble ledge is somehow
insufficient, raw and unacceptable. In the first sentence we are told they are
“mysterious”. I know well that painter chooses peaches to paint because they
are beautiful, triumphant looking, alluring, shining examples of fruition, a
joy to behold. To a painter, a passionate lover of beauty it constitutes
perfect reason to paint them, to render an extremely faithful portrait of them.
The task is undertaken with the high ambition of showing the
shocking beauty of fresh peaches so true, so present and immediate that they
would become permanent part of firmament of art.
