A Preoccupation with Contemplation

I was recently asked by my Calgary gallery to consider painting something with fruit and drapery as they have a client who is potentially interested.  The image I painted of pomegranates and drapery is from a photograph I took five years ago, when I used a film camera.  I remember the anxiety I always felt during a shoot - hoping I'd captured usable material.  I had to bracket and shoot a whole roll of film to get a couple of images that I'd be satisfied with, and then sometimes, I'd never even use them because my painting process is considerably slower than this other part of the process.

I had to expose the pomegranates and the drapery separately, in the photo for the above image, to get the detail I wanted in both.  I referenced both photographs when painting.  So, although I'm not a photorealist, it's interesting to compare exposures that couldn't actually exist in a single photograph, and have them work together in a painting.  It reminds me of how baroque painters would incorporate flowers from different seasons into a single bouquet, when they wouldn't have occurred naturally together.  They would sketch and paint details of the flowers to use as references.

When I took the photo, I had been very interested in exploring the sculptural possibilities of drapery and had been reading a book called, Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting by Anne Hollander.  She says, "Painters might use drapery to infuse their canvases with extra vitality and raw beauty, whether to suggest human power or true divinity, to enhance the tailored clothing they were scrupulously recording, or to improve the look of fruit on a plate."  Of course I was interested in improving the look of the fruit, in using the drapery but also, as Hollander says, in infusing the image with holiness, and in exploring the still life as a sort of 'residual altar.'  I had painted a show in 2003, called "A Trace of Offerings," in which I was exploring the silence, serenity, and contemplative potential of the still life.  I was also looking at the still life as a kind of offering, particularly in the case of flowers.

I learned a lot in revisiting this particular image, and it also reconfirmed my present path, my preoccupation with the stacks of books, for I find them also to be a site of contemplation, silence and meditation.