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Indianapolis Museum of Art
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A still life is a work of art depicting inanimate objects in an artificial setting. A still life will typically display commonplace objects that are either natural (food, flowers, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, etc.).
Channels: Talks
Learn about works in IMA's galleries during this gallery walkthrough featuring nationally recognized poet, Mark Doty.
How much can people learn to see or how do we learn to see?
Well, I think, you know, we have an immediate and physical response to color
and shape and line and that we enjoy, really instinctively enjoy,
that as a physical pleasure to educate that instinctive response and build context for it.
As we look more and more, the eye makes connections and this is a relationship, also, between poetry and looking at art
that you could hear a poem and be interested in rhythm and sound and in the feeling created by the words, but the more you know about that poet's work
and the more you can put it in context the richer the experience becomes. You find that other kinds of meaning are available to you.
Meaning is something that we make right now and certainly the makers of the object had multiple meanings and purposes in mind and those are always now
only going to be available to us in a partial way. You could show this to a three year old, and I think that that child could enjoy the richness of the color
and the elaborately worked way, pick out the images of the birds and the butterflies, maybe even be impressed by the scale of the thing,
in a way this feels like a toy, doesn't it? Like a toy grown to a great scale, but something else happens when you can put this in
more of a context and think about how its makers understood it. In what sort of world would this object reside?
It's hard to think about having this in your house now, don't you think?
You know, this doesn't belong in a 21st century American apartment or home exactly or let's put it this way,
if you brought this home, you would have to change your life.
This would have been made to be seen in a fairly intimate space.
Yes.
You know it is for the home. If you imagine this picture hanging in your house, if you have this in your dining room, it would seem like
something of an architectural element in that space. These are very expensive things. You know, especially that big drinking glass in the middle
is very, very fancy and the silver and, you know, the imported porcelain and the Turkey carpet,
you know, so this is stuff that a well-off trader might own, it flatters the owner in the painting.
There is a great thing that Goethe looked at paintings like this and he said that he would, I think he was talking about a Willem Kalf painting, and he said he would rather own the painting of the objects than the objects.
There are some of these elaborate gold cups and so on, but that he thought that the representation was more beautiful than the thing itself.
The paint has changed color in lemon here. They had trouble with yellow, and there is some mineral stuff called orpiment
that changed color over time and you can see how, I mean it's painted, this bravura, I mean this coil and the light and then the incredible translucency of the peeled fruit.
It's hard to imagine now how it must have looked. This was an unusually collaborative and noncompetitive period,
and you know, there were these handbooks for painters that described, you know, how to make that kind of surface on your lemons or the proper way
to get the translucency, the transparence, of the glass and so on or like this is just bravura and here look how that stem is in front of that piece of cheese.
It's just amazing.
And to some degree, you know, he is showing off, but he is also part of this guild, really, of people who are all practicing this, and it's individuality
gets expressed in how many coils of his peel, you know, he can make and how thin can that peel appear to us.
In other words, within a set vocabulary, how the details get worked out,
Right!
But you are absolutely right that this, I think, goes right into, you know, what we are looking at the pleasure of paint as paint
and of the drama of the surface. It is also true that the closer you get to it, the more you are aware of the surface
as a surface, look at this, like glass of red liquid. That's just, that placement is so nice, isn't it?
This might be fun to talk about in relation to the Kalf.
The emphasis on the brush stroke and on the individuality of perception and sort of vibrating light of the moment,
its so modern next to that other painting that it would be a useful illustration.
[You had written about still life as inexhaustible.]
Well, we are always going to be looking at and celebrating that the stuff of the world, you know.
I mean, still life in a way is a response to materiality and taking another kind of material, that's the stuff of clay and pigments
and minerals, grinding them in oil and using that kind of material to reflect the other materiality, but the Kalf painting
is so much about trying to capture the world of things and it is much less interested in the notion of individual perception,
the person who is doing the seeing in that painting is part of a community of seers who see in a relatively similar fashion, right?
Dutch still-life painting is a vocabulary and they are not so much worried about making the individual mark upon the world. They do individual things,
some are fancier like Kalf, and some are plainer and they show off with their lemon peels or their gleams of light or their representation of a glass of wine
and how transparent and perfect they can make it, but their subject still is turning outward and when I look at this painting, which is 1890, also Dutch,
it seems to me very much about the particular experience of an individual eye encountering the world
and no one else might see the rippling light in the background or the particular richness of color
and those representations of fruit in quite that way, it's about my eye encountering the material world.
There is no attempt to flatten out or disguise the brush stroke and the colors are not very
carefully blended in that way that in the Kalf painting, I see that the painter wants to make a continuous surface and here, look in that background
how one color this, kind of, luscious pink is pushing up against that blue and lavender and if we isolated just, like, that little bit,
we would say that's a 20th century painting, right? Because that's so much about the push and pull of those colors and brush strokes against each other.
If we are creatures that disappear, which of course we are,
what are we to do about that? How do we find a way to resist our own vanishing and it seems
that one way that we do that is to make ourselves memorable to achieve a kind of distinction, a specificity, that is hard to forget, right?
So when we walk into this gallery and you encounter something that is plainly a Gauguin
you know, when you are in the School of Gauguin, anyway, or we encounter a particular style of looking at the world.
One thing we find ourselves thinking is someone was here. A particular eye and a particular hand made this,
and it has relationships to the work of other eyes and other hands but if it's truly an achieved work of art, it couldn't really quite be anybody else's.
That's what poets do, too. You know, we become a voice and the voice, if we are lucky, stands when the body of the poet is gone.
This is why you can read a great poet like Emily Dickinson and you have some sense of what her breath
might have been like, her hesitation, her rapid utterances, her qualifications and shifts of thought,
some sense of a rapid nervous voice worrying out experience, and that voice is something, it's not just natural,
it didn't just emerge out of her. She made it. She made that voice to stand for her in the world and that's a remarkable thing
about the persistence of works of art. That we are in contact, if we give ourselves over to this, with a subjectivity that we can't meet any other way
except in this and this particular vessel of that subjectivity reaches through us across time.
Oh isn't that gorgeous? Wow!
It's such a rush, isn't it? Great, this is what lyric poetry tries to do, is to freeze as it were at the single moment,
that it's always in the present tense and the expansive song of feeling in the present and in that sense, it is a very lyric painting, right!
This is, we were talking about another still life over there where if we were to isolate a part of this, you would say that's a 20th century painting
and if you look at that, it seems to really predict those beautiful diebenkorn landscapes, right.
The figurative paintings that are about landscape but they are also very much about areas of paint pushing against each other.
You can't take it in, is what it is. Your eye has to keep moving, there's no place to rest in it and you are always moving from one patch, one incident to another and another.
I think a lot of people, at first, are totally disoriented by what kind of space is evoked here and don't, in fact, even notice the figures.
This has such amazing dynamic force that it really feels like the figurative bit is almost incidental, isn't it?
I agree.
They are just there to satisfy the 19th century.
So, I think that treatment of them, which as you noted similar to the way everything else's treated contributes to that sort of flattening.
There's a space and a form suggested, but it's not even the real subject here.
Right, and that's going to be an interesting thing to talk about in connection to the Kalf, the two, because they're both world as surface, right?
But, they are really different kinds of surface. As we were saying earlier that the still life was never exhausted, this seems, even though it's not a still life, it has a quality of being really inexhaustible.
Like you could look at that forever, and the looking at it forever has to do with the way the senses are always a new thing, always a fresh thing, right?
So, every time you would come back to this painting, there is something happening physically. There is something happening in the eye and these collisions and explosions of color
that you don't get weary of. That's why we don't want to walk away from it because it just keeps yielding and yielding so much experience.
Gostei muito do site. parabéns!!!!
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