Weekend Still-life Painting Courses

April 5th- 7th ( Saturday to Monday )

 

Still-life is not as simple as flinging a drape over a table, scattering some apples across it and placing a carafe of wine on the left. It could be, but that does not mean it bodes well  for an interesting or inspiring painting.

Still-life is a kind of visual poetry offering endless opportunities  to experiment with forms, composition and symbolism. A chance  to explore a world of  surfaces, natural forms, objects and light.

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Our Weekend Still-life Painting Courses aim to  reveal a number of different approaches to still life with the purpose of helping you find your own way and to always have something on hand to work from. You will also be  introduced to a range diverse  artists from different times and eras up to the present day

There will be a large selection of man made objects and natural forms. You will be asked to bring things of your choice as well.  We will aim to develop at least 3 pieces of work each. These could be a mix of drawings, paintings or collages.

Gallery.

View a selection of still life painting course work produced on previous courses

 The weekend still-life painting courses have 8 places and accommodate all levels.

Materials.

It is advised you bring your own materials to draw and paint. We have  stock but this is really a  standby.There is no shortage of large  drawing sheets, primed paper canvases easels, drawing board and work stations.  There is also a small stock of brushes for sale, but it is best to bring  your own. We will send out a list of a few essentials 6 weeks in advance of the course, but this won’t be extensive as the intention is not to burden you with extra or unnecessary costs.Any problems or advice  can  be sorted out  when you book.

Lunches

Our lunches are outsourced  to an award winning chef called  Gavin Kellett, who provides us with very wholesome  and delicious vegetarian soups. If you have dietary requirements please let us know. Lunch  provides a very welcomed break  from the working studio. It is held in the spacious dining room in the main house.

Refreshments. Coffee ,teas and biscuits will still be freely available through out the day. 

Local Art Shop.   Abergavenny

Accommodation and Locality photos

BOOKING:  weekend still life painting  courses….follow this link

 

An essay Introducing  Still-life 

This is a short history about still-life painting introducing a few artists and examples along the way. Strictly speaking Still Life or Nature Morte means the depiction of inanimate objects and anything not living. By the 17th century the scope had widened and included perishables such as flora and fruit. Therefore we tend to think of still-life as a collection of the above, arranged in a certain aesthetic order, to make a well-balanced composition. However, this is only an aspect of the whole genre from its pre-history beginnings to the present day. The development has not been in a straight line, but what has been an advantage is its very long history.

Prehistoric Cave Paintings.

It could be said still-life painting began on cave walls around  45,000 years ago. The images were not only tales about beasts and hunting, but more about human existence.  Some walls were covered with an abundance of hand impressions. In one sense you might see them as still-lives.  Certainly depictions of life, but long gone and inaminate .  What is remarkable about these impressions is they appeared for thousands of years across most continents and were very similar in application, regardless of what land mass they were made on. It then becomes evident these signs or images were part of a universal language.  How this happened remains a mystery as the cave dwellers from each continent could not have possibly met or seen  each-other’s art.

When the early cave painters  removed their hands from the wall, (having sprayed them with pigment), they must have been shocked with utter disbelief.  What they saw were their hands, but hands where they had once been. Then to  realise these hands were present and absent at the same time.  In today’s language we would call this  ‘a light bulb moment’.

The caves were clearly places of ritual.  When the non-painters first saw the decorated cave walls they must have experienced joy and wonderment from all the waving hands.  Were they being greeted or were they saying goodbye?  Were they going or coming from the underworld or life beyond?   Because of the delicacy of the sprayed imagery these hands were far more sophisticated, elusive, magical  than the average handprint made with mud from the year dot.

20th Century

There are a number of contemporary artists who have used their own handprints as part of their vocabulary.  Jasper Johns and Richard Long are among the best known.  There is no doubt they were influenced by cave art and the prehistoric era.

Please note the  Jasper Johns self-portrait . The hands sit in the same kind of space as the cave painted hands on cave walls.  Both  seem to be behind the surface as if trapped  or in a separate world.

Egyptians

The Egyptians decorated the inside of their tombs with food to honour their deceased and provide them with sustenance to help  them  on their journey into the after-life.  It is not surprising the term Still- life or Nature Morte has prevailed for many years.  Historically, and right from the beginning, many of the images used in still-life, dwelled on the theme of life and death.

Dutch

Still life painting, in a technical and representational way, peaked in the 17th Century with outstanding works by the Dutch Masters. The combination of a type of hyper realism from the Dutch, and then photography, much later on, were undoubtably a breaking point which  fuelled the rethinking of painting  in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Cezanne

The conundrum in the mid 19th century about what and how to paint was extremely central to Cezanne’s thinking.  Most people would not associate this painting with him.  It is from his mid-career having spent years studying and looking at the old masters.  You can see echoes of Dutch and Spanish painting.  You can also see how Cezanne was grappling with the whole idea of perception, representation and the interlocking of all this with the language of paint itself.  The painting seems a century ahead of its time. It reminds us of the heavy impasto work by post war British painters, such as Bomberg and Frank Auerbach.

Present and past

Today in our post modernist world still-life seems to have become a slightly old-fashioned term. However, it is still alive and kicking from its very long tradition.  The Dutch masters existed some 360 years ago. The Royal Academy is presently showing a retrospective of the living artist Michael Craig-Martin (born 1941), whose take on content, constructing and designing a still life is not too dissimilar from that of the Dutch.

The above two paintings exude opulence. The Pieter de Ring in terms of the abundance of luxury food and their beauty (Vanitas ) which were made for the very rich. The Craig Martin takes mundane objects and arranges them in a similar way, but he dresses them in opulent colour. But are the Craig Martin’s objects and subject matter about ordinariness?  On closer examination his painting is a personal history where he pays homage to his artistic heroes. The objects he has taken are from his heroes’ best-known works. Duchamp’s urinal and his hat-stand, which ironically looks a bit like Pieter de Ring’s lobster,  or is it an octopus? The brush-pot and light bulb is Jasper Johns. The pipe and glass of water is Magritte, but the glass could also be Craig-Martin’s famous glass of water parading as an oak tree? Who knows what the clip board represents?

Years between 1650- 2000

Before getting too distracted we need to look at some paintings between the Dutch and post-modern era.  By post-modern I mean Warhol, Caulfield, Lichenstein etc.  We must not forget where we have come from. There is plenty of fertile ground in these years between, which have not depended so much on graphic rendering. Artists such as Chardin, Cezanne, Juan Gris (cubism), Richard Diebenkorn and Morandi etc,  are always worth familiarising yourselves with. These were artists in the tradition of unravelling what they saw or perceived in front of them, processed through the filter of their own eyes, more than their conceptual minds. The two coexist but it has always been a balancing act.

Morandi  1890-1964

Morandi started off in the Italian metaphysical movement which was conceptual and close to surrealism. His later work never lost that intellectual rigour, as he became more concerned with perception through a direct visual approach to whatever he chose to scrutinise.   He was well versed in the tradition of still-life painting and became a great exponent of what we mean as ‘less is more’.   He pared everything down to essentials with absolutely no frills. His greatest influence has been on the recent  minimalist approach to painting whether abstract or representational .

 

Sean Scully, (illustrated above )  is an abstract artist, who was greatly influenced by Morandi. You can see the connection  in the painting above and the Morandi below.

Sean Scully’s paintings are minimal and reduced to abstract elements, but what is left is something very felt and tangible.Scully has flattened pictorial depth much more than Morandi. With Morandi you definitely see objects set against backgrounds, but with Scully it is not so certain and is much more ambiguous.At first glance the smaller bands, in the centre, seem to stack up to being an object with the broader horizontal bands acting as background. Then, with a more considered look, the object and background seem to dissolve into a single surface, but nothing like a flat wall.

Scully’s  paintings attract a huge amount of attention as people are naturally drawn to the painterly experience. In many ways this also applies to Morandi. Like Morandi , Scully binds and  budges his shapes together until they settle. Both painters produce works of art which are neither static or rigid. Everything is allowed to be in flux and has come from that state. Paintings such as these take you to calm and contemplative places.  They are not too dissimilar in territory to Mark Rothko.

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Richard Diebenkorn 1922-1993

             

 

                   

Richard Diebenkorn – An American painter who worked both figuratively and with abstraction.  One fed into the other.  The bottom left painting may look totally abstract but the image is derived from his studio window overlooking Ocean Park as is the image on the left

The lefthand top drawing is what I call a tablescape. Random objects scattered across a table, left as found and not set up or composed. The knife in a glass seems  found not composed.

Cubism

Juan Gris 1887 – 1927

This painting feels very contemporary suggesting Caulfield and Craig Martin.. There are several languages of representation going on here. The table comes across as real, though the perspective has been reversed. The carpet behind falls between abstraction and figuration.  The sheets of music and the artist’s palette have a reality, but not in the same way as the table which is 3 dimensional. The guitar is an image that has morphed itself into the palette, table surface and sheets of music. In the end the mind tells us a guitar is present, but the eye finds it elusive or somewhat transient, in a sense a bit like music, which seems to be the subject of this painting

Putting surrealism on one side, it could be argued that the greatest and most influential group of still life artists in the 20th century were the cubists –  namely Braque, Picasso and Gris.  There was Matisse also and later Europeans and Americans such as Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Nash, Ivon Hitchens, Mary Fedden, Prunella Cough, Giorgio Morandi, William Scott, William, Ben and Winfred Nicholson and many others who have made huge contributions. They certainly defined and broadened our understanding of still life and much more. However, for most of them, still life was not an end in itself; the idiom or medium was only a vehicle they used to find and further their own ways .

Niel Bally 3/10/2024

( ref. Weekend Still-life painting courses. April 2025 . Art Course Wales.)