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Still Life.

 

In my post on translation, I wrote how I go through phases of obsessively doing an activity until I tire of it. I said that I was going to stick to drawing. I have since started on watercolours and am now back to gardening. I went to a garden centre and saw lots of beautiful plants but realised that plants have become quite expensive. I remembered that I used to order from Chiltern Seeds so decided to look on their web site. Big mistake – I now have twelve packets of seed on the way, and I don’t know if I have room to grow them or even plant them.

In many ways gardening helps art, it gives me inspiration and there is something very grounding about digging in dirt. My art is always about the natural world, albeit dead plants, root, twigs and bones. I would call it vanitas art – art about the transience of things.

I have always suffered from a form of existential angst. I find existence strange. Sometimes I feel as though it could all dissolve at any moment. This angst is probably the root cause of all our obsessive behaviour: drinking, drug taking, shopping, frenetic activity and socialising. It is no doubt the root of philosophy, spirituality and art.

For me, making art means not thinking. I become so absorbed in what I am doing that there is no room for other thoughts. Art is not therapy, but the angst appears in the subject matter. The way I work is very similar to the way the Flemish Still Life artists worked. Ancestors left Flanders at some point in the 1600’s hence the name Fleming – a person from Flanders. That these works were painted from life is doubtful. Often artists would re-use images from other works or use images from copy books such as the Archetypa Studiaque Patris by Georgi I Hoefnagel II (1592). R.H. Fuchs in Dutch Painting writes that Vase of Flowers by Ambrosius Bosschaert was,

‘… composed from illustrations in scientific flower-books rather than from actual observation.’

R.H. Fuchs, Dutch Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 109.

I am always re-translating certain visual images into new artworks. Sometimes the images are drawn from life and sometimes they are drawn from previous works or scientific illustrations.









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