A moment in time
Still life is a moment in time that sets us forward on a journey of discovery.
Ilike to think that still life is one of those genres that will always be around.
It seems the most natural of processes for an artist – setting up a grouping of objects before an easel and setting about interpreting it with paint.
What is amazing is just how different the results this process produces can be.
With an artist like, say, Clairmont, of which we hold a good example in the Te Manawa Collection, the splattering of paint can make it hard to make out the subject.
But, then, other artists take an approach of more careful articulation, in the manner of the Dutch 17th-century painters – the absolute kings of the still life.
Conceptually, a big part of it for many artists is the selection of the objects themselves. In some paintings, they might appear haphazard, but often they are their own statements of identity, value or, in the Vanitas paintings, clues for moral messages about the brevity of life.
Enter the exhibition ‘‘Commodities’’, by Roger Staples, at Palmerston North’s Taylor Jensen Fine Arts, running until the end of the month.
A new artist to the gallery, but not to art, Staples is from the area – born in Feilding and completing teachers’ training in Palmerston North after doing a fine arts degree at Elam – now living in Auckland.
In his artist notes, Staples describes himself as firstly being a ‘‘brash modernist’’, before taking up what could be described as the quieter pastime of still life. Or is that indeed just how we imagine it – the young painter hurling paint while the older artist works away in more considered fashion.
This sort of changeover is a history I have heard many times from the artists trained in the 60s and 70s, when exposed to the new avant-garde methods of art they often regret the lack of the rigors of technical training and later in life go back and learn it themselves.
Staples’ objects are intentionally humble things: cardboard boxes, beer crates, stools and tables, often picked for use as display platforms or small contained areas, set up with shells, eggs, horns and skulls, jugs and vases. There’s also a stuffed pukeko that makes its way into a number of the works, some blue bottles, a pumpkin and an apple. They are treated like compositional props, set up in an arrangement that is decided as balanced and then painted.
Staples’ paintwork is in the realist tradition, but in a broad sense, it isn’t super-realist or overly enacted, nor is it very expressive and wild – these still life works are decidedly still.
It has a slight formality to it and feels a bit like it is part of another time. This is interesting, as aren’t these objects the same over time? A paua shell is the same paua now, as it was 20 years ago.
The dating is due to the choice of these things for interest and the structured way the paint is laid down.
It is straightforward art, tributing simple things and the simple pleasure of painting.
Commodities, paintings by Roger Staples, at Taylor Jensen Fine Arts until March 28.
Staples’ objects are intentionally humble things: cardboard boxes, beer crates, stools and tables, often picked for use as display platforms.