Artist Statement
 History of Still Life Series
   
 
My current series of paintings is titled History of Still Life.  This series does not merely copy well-known paintings by artists such as Dali, Cezanne, Zurburan, Chardin, Picasso, Van Gogh, Kalf, and Morandi. Rather, I re-interpret the still life arrangements of historical artworks and paint my own versions of them.
 
My intent is to pay homage, to deconstruct, and also to see in which ways the meaning and style of these pieces translate into my own work.  I have been seriously studying Baroque still life for the last decade and my paintings have always been haunted by images from this period.  In this series I have expanded my studies to include images from other periods of art, starting with the wall paintings of Pompeii, through the re-birth of the still life in the Baroque era, to the images of the 19th and 20th centuries.  I don’t emulate the style of each era or artist, but re-create these still life arrangements and paint them in the ‘neutral’ or objective realist style which I practice.  My goal is to see if the still life will remain recognizable as a Van Gogh or a Picasso, for example, and how it is transformed by this method. 
 
I have practiced still life painting for more than twenty years and I want to get to the heart of this genre throughout history by examining the different approaches of various epochs and artists.  Still life is a suitable genre in which to compare different artists because the vocabulary of forms – fruit, flowers, drapery, etc, - doesn’t change much over the centuries.  Therefore it is an excellent way of studying difference of style and mood.  In one sense, the project represents the search of an individual artist to connect with a long tradition.  In another sense it can be seen as a comment on our geographical isolation from the masterpieces of Western art history.  The work might be seen as tongue-in-cheek by some, or blasphemous by others.  I hope this project will promote discussion of what constitutes an iconic masterpiece.  Much recent artwork has been concerned with quotation from art history.  Many artists have copied the paintings of other artists.  I believe that my project is different because it reconstructs the arrangements of other artists but presents them in a unified style in order to question the differences between various practices of painting over the last two millennium.