Monday, April 26, 2010





Here's the master work I'm copying, by Clara Peeters.
The song Big Top Candy Mountain comes to mind. I never noticed 'til I started doing copies how that shadowy loaf of bread in the back right can't be more than 1/10 on the table. And then you've got almost everything else hanging off the edge of the table as well, and this precarious cheese tower . . . It's, like, this impossibly bounteous table, I guess. Some of the stuff comes from distant places - like the bowls from China, the crustaceans from the ocean, some of it's local - like the cheeses and beer. I think the blue of the table cloth would have conveyed a sense of wealth, if not holiness, due to that color's association with the virgin Mary.
The picture is imaginary. The 17th Century dutch still life artists did studies of individual objects and put them together into one picture. So you could say the place is imaginary. But then, there is no place, just a black void. Though I suppose the table is a place, and the bowls, and so on. In any case, it evokes a place. It's a happy place, a place that provides for you, where you would not suffer.

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