Hello and welcome to 'Make and Create'. My name's Nick, I'm an artist and I'm an
Educator at the National Gallery. As you can see today I'm not in the
National Gallery. I'm actually in my studio.
We're going to look at a personal favorite subject of mine which is still life.
The National Gallery has lots of wonderful still life paintings
and I want us to look at three pictures in particular
and then what we're going to do is think about constructing our own still life.
Now, of course, in your home there will be
lots and lots of things that potentially could be in a still life
so we'll be thinking about that.
The first painting I wanted to talk about to you today is a painting by
Gustave Courbet. This was painted in 19th century, in
about the 1870s. Courbet was a bit of a firebrand artist
and it's an appropriate painting for us to look at because,
at the time this painting was done, Courbet was in lockdown,
he was in isolation, so we know something about this.
The painting, of course, is a still life with
apple, quince, pomegranate, and his sister would bring him these
fruits so the only bright thing in his life at that time was to be
able to paint; fortunately he had his paint and he had his brushes
and in the six months imprisonment he was able to paint
and he painted many still lifes. So, fruit in a bowl,
very simple, very humble, something that I'm sure we can all
try and arrange something along these lines in our own homes.
So inspired by the Courbet I've raided my kitchen and found a few
simple pieces of fruit and a plate and a very simple glass
and tried to create something along those lines.
What I'm very mindful of, of course, is where the light is coming from
and in the Courbet still life it's coming from the left
and the background which is extremely dark
so the fruit, the objects, we'll just concentrate on those that's all we're
really looking at. You're probably looking at this and
thinking it looks rather underwhelming and
indeed it is so what we will probably do with our photographs when we've taken
them is you can put them on the computer and
boost the contrast, maybe increase the saturation of the
colours or if you've taken the picture on your phone, there
are various filters that you can use to give a more, kind of, painterly look to
your photograph.
The second painting today I wanted to look at is a painting by Luis Meléndez
and he specialised in still life and what we're looking at
is everyday stuff from a Spanish market or a Spanish kitchen
at the time and he uses these
very humble objects but somehow by the very act of painting them
he turns them into something rather epic: they become
much bigger than they are. I think it's quite interesting when you look at
things like this in a painting that if you saw these things in real life you
would probably pay them no attention whatsoever but
when they're painted they become transformed.
Essentially the picture is made up of cylinders,
spheres and cubes and they're all containers
and everything they contain obviously we can't see, apart from the walnut shells
where we just get a glimpse of the nut itself actually
peeping out from the walnut shell.
I'm fascinated too, in this painting, how
Meléndez uses perspective: most of the picture, the objects, we're
looking down on them but if you look at the jug on the right
it's actually a very imposing form and that's because
it's above us. It's almost as if the jug is
slightly looking down on us.
So here's my attempt to do something
kind of in the spirit of Meléndez, although a more austere
version. What I've done is I've used a very
restrictive palette so it might be an idea when you do your still life, so
just a thought, maybe a still life which is just made
of completely white objects or a still life made of clear objects
might be quite interesting to do but
Meléndez tended to use his colour in a very restricted way
so that when you do have some colour it really kind of
zings out of the composition so I've just moved the orange here
and the slight yellow of the small pear. Also the surfaces are all quite similar,
like in the Meléndez, they're all rather flat,
non-reflective surfaces which again just emphasises the forms.
So in that painting that we looked at by Meléndez it's the formal qualities that
he's very interested in. It's a very intellectual
approach to designing a painting.
Over one hundred years before Meléndez was painting in Madrid,
Willem Kalf painted this incredible painting in Amsterdam
and when we think about still life painting we often
attach the word Dutch to still life, dutch still life, and that's because
in a very short space of time artists in Holland
were able to kind of reach incredible levels of perfection in their paintings.
Still life as an independent genre had only been around for about 50 years when
this painting was done. What i mean is that still lifes had
existed in ancient Rome and then sort of rather disappeared,
only to be reawakened in around 1600 where in
Italy, Spain and in Holland
this independent genre was given a whole new lease of life.
This painting is extremely lavish, very sumptuous,
obviously painted for somebody very, very wealthy. Everything in it
is expensive in its own right or expensive because it's come from a very
long way away. Ironically, in the days when this was painted, if something had
come from many miles away it would tend to make it
very valuable indeed. So if you look at the carpet
on the table, that's a Persian carpet, an artwork in its own right and highly
valued, if you think of the lemon; it's probably
Sicilian, nothing like that would be available
locally unless grown under glass, again that would make it expensive.
The wine, the glasses, the glasses are probably from
Venice, handmade of course, and exquisite, beautiful things.
And the lobster is, although local, as is now
a very expensive form of food. So this is a lavish still life indeed.
Kalf was clearly very interested in
deceiving our eyes: making us think that we were actually
seeing something real, something three-dimensional, that in fact
is, of course, two-dimensional and he does this by
actually pushing some of the objects in the painting
perilously close to the edge of the table. The lobster on the plate looks almost as
if it might tumble out into our own space, the lemon which has
been kind of elegantly peeled with a knife to
form a kind of spiral, a lovely lemon spiral shape,
looks like it all could almost fall out into our world
and people like this, they like this deceiving of the eye,
trompe-l'oeil as it's called, where something looks so convincing
you could almost reach out and touch it.
So i've searched around to see what I
can come up with for the Kalf challenge. I should admit that I do collect
objects that can be used in still lifes
and a lot of these things to be truthful are artificial:
grapes, silk flowers, the skull as well and the fruit, it's all artificial and
the wine incidentally is real.
I'm thinking about different
textures and surfaces of course: metallic, glass
and this sort of silky piece of material which
catches the light in quite a nice, sumptuous way
and I've also tipped the bowl here and the plate here to create a sort of
disruption in the still life to animate it. It's a contradiction really
but to animate something that's very still but I think that creates interest
and certainly a lot of Dutch artists would do that: the grape sort of
falling out of the bowl.
Hopefully you've got some ideas now from what we've looked at
and you can create your own still life. What I'd like to suggest is that when
you do create your still life you choose three of the following
four items: the first of these is something ephemeral,
the second is something that will be around
many, many years from now, the third is something of incredibly low value
but that means a great deal to you, something great personal value,
and the fourth is something new because everything we've been looking at so far
has been kind of old stuff and we have to remember that when Courbet
and Meléndez and Kalf were painting their still lifes
the things that they were painting were new, they were new things
so maybe we could include something that has been made very, very recently.
Okay lots of ideas there. Hopefully that's giving you food for thought
and you can produce something interesting. I'm sure you will.
Thank you very much for watching. I've enjoyed talking to you today. Goodbye.