Illusion Versus Reality

Still-life wall painting, Pompeii, before 69 AD.

In painting, they have always been a minor genre. They have mostly been sublimated to history painting, portraiture, even the lowly landscape. Someone eons ago decided to call such work still-lifes. From the very start it's a contradiction of terms. A better phrase might have been life, stilled. That is to say, a bit of life, animal, vegetable, or mineral, culled by the artist from its natural environment, and "stilled" into a contrived arrangement hopefully signifying something. As painting goes, they're a relatively recent development, perhaps growing out of the props used to decorate portraits or religious paintings. Both, going back centuries, sometimes have exciting little nooks and crannies with modest, often exquisite little still-life representations. Vermeer comes to mind...and Rembrandt.

The Milkmaid (detail), ca. 1658, Jan Vermeer

Not coincidentally, both were Dutch. Of course, by the time painting came of age in the low countries and northern Germany, the still-life had long been a staple in the painter's art. In fact, the genre reached a sort of peak in the hard-edged realism reflecting the highly materialistic world of Flemish art. Not until our modern era do we again see it hold such sway. Strangely enough, it was Picasso, Braque, and the Cubists who once more brought up the subject, using it as a platform for their experiments in shattering illusions of planes and textures. Artists as diverse as Marsden Hartley, and James McNeill Whistler have tried their hand at it. Photographer's delight in them, perhaps because they offer the opportunity to experiment almost endlessly with nuances of light and shadow, edges, reflections, and textures, and afterwards, if you've chosen your model carefully, you can eat it.

Flowers and Vase, 1985, Donald Sulton

Painters routinely deal with two primal elements in their work--reality and Illusion. Like fire and water, in the art of still-life painting, they are often at war with one another. American still-life artists such as Charles Bird King, several of the Peales, William Harnett, Frederick Peto, and others all, chose to explore the illusional end. An artist by the name of Donald Sulton uses tar, oil, plaster,even linoleum over Masonite to explore the reality of the genre. His 1985 Flowers and Vase (left) is a modern example. In my own work, I've done both, even tried to broker a peace between the warring factions by mixing the two elements, asking, "Where does illusion end and reality begin?" We can paint extremely credible illusions of reality with oils or fabricate sculptural illusions with all manner of mixed media, even appropriating the "real thing," an actually apple for instance, in the ultimate homage to reality. In dealing with these extremes, on the one end there is painted, two-dimensional illusion masquerading as reality, while on the other extreme is three-dimensional reality masquerading as art, which begs the question, is it, in fact, "art" once it reaches such an extreme? Hurry and answer before the apple rots.

 

The titles below refer to "before" the diet and "after" with elements of the still-life fabricated, painted, and attached to the surface, even "breaking" the frame.

Before, 2000, Jim Lane

After, 2000, Jim Lane