SYMBOLIC OBJECTS

Collector’s Focus: Still Lifes

The earliest still life paintings were made in Egypt 17,000 years ago. Artists have kept the genre alive for millennia. Today, the nature morte of the French has never been more alive.

The inanimate—or perhaps dead—objects in still lifes can be rich with symbolism. Manet thought “still life is the touchstone of a painter…A painter can say all he wants to say with fruit or flowers or even clouds…”

We often think of things as black or white—this, not that. We’re less comfortable with grays.

In her Composition with Blue Cups, Olga Antonova explores the “gray” of

“blue” from aqua to cobalt. The cups’ lives as vessels are blurred by a slight irregularity in their drawing. The texture of the canvas is evident as are her brushstrokes in the highlights on the rims of the cups. This is a painting. I admire the still lifes of the Golden Age of the 17th century, but I am more in awe of the human brain that can deal simultaneously with the fact that a few brushstrokes on a canvas “are” teacups as much as they “are” brushstrokes. For Antonova the teacups are incidental to solving the technical problems of representing shapes, color and light. The process is meditative as she contemplates what is in front of her and begins to interpret it in paint.

Scott Conary gives the paint even more presence, straddling the line between representation and abstraction. He uses strong, sometimes straight colors, building up and scraping away until, in a way, the painting tells him it is finished. In Narcissus, there is a suggestion of a window frame, its linearity distorted through the glass bottle, and of outdoor vegetation. The bottle on the ledge and the yellow-white and orange blossoms are bathed in light and burst from the surface.

Conary says, “…a painting is largely an act of intuition. The way a mark is made and how it builds the image is itself a