“and one day an apple fell”

Still life painting and its TRANSPORTIVE possibilities

4/10-28/11 curator talk 15/11/23

“And one day the apple fell”

Still life painting and it’s transportive possibilities

Curated by Dan Howard-Birt

Featuring thr work of: Andreas Rüthi, Jacqui Hallum, Nina Royle, Lee Maelzer, Mahali O’Hare, Philip Nicol, Dan Howard-Birt,

Lee Johnson, Casper White, Andrew Churchill, Jamie Atherton

Still life painting is a centuries-old convention where a painter gathers small objects on a tabletop, stands in front of this arrangement, and attempts to make equivalents - in paint - of what they see. There are two separate things going on here. Firstly, the choice of objects might say something about the times the painter lives in and the communities they engage with, or the arrangement might say something about home-life or studio-life. Secondly, and of equal importance, is the presence of the painter. The time it takes to stand over the tabletop motif with brush in hand is a special time. In the concentration of looking, mixing colour and applying paint, time moves differently, our minds wander and the objects being painted take on strange personalities, charged characteristics or they remind us of painting precedents that all painters mentally carry around with them. The painter is both present (bearing witness) and transported (dreaming through painting)

Just as making still life painting seems to embrace the divergent processes of recording and dreaming, so too looking at still life painting opens-up a feeling that the image is both a collection of ordinary objects and the seed of metaphoric potentialities. From the vanitas contemplation of death among living things or the demonstration of culture or wealth through blooms and trinkets, to the conjuring of landscape spaces within the folds of a cloth or the processing of influences, still life paintings have endless possibilities for becoming bigger and more complex than they at first seem.

The exhibition title borrows equally from T J Clark’s recent appraisal of Cezanne whereby all things are woven into a precarious and delicately held continuum (himself citing Ernst Bloch: “no longer fruit, nor fruit made over into paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they were to fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.”), and from the lyrical rhythm of Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue. ‘I had a job in the great north woods / Working as a cook for a spell / But I never did like it all that much / And one day the axe just fell’. Dylan’s axe is both a woodcutter’s tool and the action of quitting or losing a job. So too, the apples, cups, flowers and pots in this show cannot help but be more than they appear.

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