Saturday, October 01, 2011

More Contemporary Realists

Here are some more contemporary realist and classical realist artists whose work I like.


Christopher Stott, a man after my own luddite heart: wind-up clocks, rotary dial phones and manual typewriters.

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Odd Nerdrum, damn disturbing at times, but ... holy moley! When I can paint like this, I'll be done.


I know I've posted about him before but he's always worth coming back to. Very often, Nerdrum's paintings leave me in a profoundly perplexed state. They confuse and upset me


and I can't stop looking at them.

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Michael Naples. I mentioned once to Andrea that when I was younger, I couldn't understand the point of still life, but now I am interested in almost nothing else.


Whenever I look at the portfolio of an artist I always click over to the still life section first because it gives me the best idea of his ability and interests. She said that it is easy to make grand subjects look wonderful and if all artists ever did was portraits of famous people or heroic scenes from history, art would be very dull. "If you can make an onion look interesting, you've really got talent."

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Mark Haltoff

I'm not entirely sure what it is about still life that so grabs my attention. I know that I can't stand busyness, noise, kerfuffle. I hate going to Rome. I have hated big cities since I started living in them in my early 20s. I have an idea about heaven, that it is, above all, quiet.

Or maybe it's simpler than that. Still life painting always reminds me of painting in the dining room with Grandma. We're really never so sophisticated as we would like to think, are we?



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4 comments:

love the girls said...

Hilary Jane Margaret White writes : "I couldn't understand the point of still life, but now I am interested in almost nothing else."

While not pointless, it more like a stroll through the woods versus at a story of human drama.

Both edifying in their own way, but we need the second in the same way as we are by nature social.

Mark S. Abeln said...

Still life is a masterful medium, even in photography. I recently hosted a still life challenge here. Very few entrants are excellent, unfortunately, since so few people actually 'get' what they ought to do.

I love your art postings: beauty saves!

Anonymous said...

Reading your blog has given me a new appreciation for still life. I was just wondering why I find these images so arresting and it occurred to me that during the normal course of daily life I would not usually stop to contemplate a lemon rind or the interior of an avocado. Still life makes you stop and really look at what is considered prosaic and see the inherent beauty in each subject. I can really feel myself running my fingers over that silky avocado flesh...

Lydia

Anonymous said...

Wow.
The Nerdrum stuff is haunting, thanks for introducing me.

You might like this guy's still lifes:

http://www.mutualart.com/Artist/David-Abed/FCCBFB8748BD3804

(I was just looking for a picture of a pear...)