Strange Still Lifes

Every morning starts off with such great potential. The sun is shining, the birds singing and the sky seems to be waiting. Unless I’m in the middle of a painting that I’m engrossed in, every morning begins with the question ‘what am I going to paint today’, which fills me with great excitement and anticipation. By mid morning, I realize the day is moving on and I haven’t put a stroke of paint on my canvas. I wrack my brains – what is it that will excite me enough to actually motivate me to put it on canvas. You see, unless I get enthused about a subject, I just don’t feel like painting it. Some of my artist friends say they don’t break their heads about this – just take a flower or a bush or a mountain and paint it, they say. I can’t. I have to be in love with my subject, I need to find joy in it, to want to explore all its mysteries with my brush, paints and mind.

Anyway, desperate for something to paint, I decided I’ll just do some still lifes, you know, fruits, flowers, vases and jars sorts of things. And suddenly now I’m fascinated by them all, because, even though I begin with the idea of painting them as realistically as I can, they are ending up in these strange still lifes.

Oh, must tell you.. one of my non-artist (haha, he'll love that when he reads this) friends read the 'what's the point' post and chided me, saying, you artists are such spoilt brats, I wish I could draw/paint like you, I would have been the happiest person and never ever complain. To which I retorted, well, you can. Anyone can draw and paint. Children draw and paint instinctively. Only thing is most children don't get the opportunity to develop the inborn skill further - in our country because of the pressure of studying in order to get a job taking precedence. But, given a chance, it's a craft like any other craft or skill, which anyone can train herself/himself on. Look around you, practically everything you see can be reduced to their basic shapes; cylinder, sphere, cube, cone. Draw the basic shapes, getting the proportions as accurately as you can, which is also easy to learn, and put it on your paper or canvas. As for the colour, they're just basically various compositions of the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow. A little practice and you can create a huge variety of hues with these.

The question then of course is when does a drawing, a craft, become art. Will talk about that in my next post. I had wanted to upload another strange still life, but it's just taking too long today. I need to paint.