works un/still life

Rachel Ruysch (1665–1750)
A ‘Forest Floor’ still life of Flowers
1679–1750

The idea of unstill life arises out of the neuroscience Sarah Sutton researched for her book, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience and the Stories of our Lives. Much of her work in writing, art and psychoanalysis enquires into the question of polarity. She is interested in the capacity for both ends of any given spectrum to be potentially present; seen or unseen at any given moment. The physicist Niels Bohr’s ideas about wave-particle duality explore the un/still life polarity. When you make or take a picture of a wave, you capture its shape at an instant of time, essentially a snapshot of the unstill wave. The still image holds potential for change, for movement, for flux and flow. 

unstill life: the snapshot and the wave

In conversation with Andrew Harrison at the artworks studio, the idea of unstill life took hold. The tradition of still life painting offers just such a snapshot of life’s ongoing wave. The painting gives us an instance of life in the moment. It contains the potential for change, for movement, for decay, for transformation. Still life presents some of the most sublimely beautiful painting in art history, but it is very far from a decorative exercise in composition, colour and texture. From this point of view it is in truth philosophical, conceptual. As Ángel Aterido, curator of a major exhibition of Spanish still-life painting at BOZAR, Brussels, explains, “These paintings went to [buyers’] libraries, not to their dining rooms”.

calling attention to the frame

Take Carlo Crivelli (c.1430–c.1495), whom Sarah Sutton and Andrew Harrison encountered through Jonathan Watkins’ final show as director of Ikon Gallery. In the fifteenth century, Crivelli played with perspective and trompe l’oeil theatricality in a way that can only be described as post modern. He calls attention to the fabrication, the staging of the scene he paints. Nothing is as it seems.

He uses the surreal to call into question the nature of artistic representation, and the viewer’s sense of the real. In The Vision of Blessed Gabriele (c.1489, courtesy of the National Gallery, London), a festoon of fruit tied by two thin cords hangs directly from the frame of the picture. It suggests a stage set. We are somewhere between artifice and the real. 

Carlo Crivelli (c1430 – c1494)
The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele c1489

unstill life: shadows on the sky

Furthermore, the shadows on the sky – cast by the swags of fruit – bring us back to the present moment. They draw our attention to the fact that this is painted. Crivelli reminds us that we are looking at a two-dimensional surface, a representation. He is not interested in pretending that this is not a painting. In this he is pre-figuring Magritte and the Treachery of Images: This is not a Pipe (1929) by some centuries.

René Magritte (1896-1967)
The Treachery of Images 1929

Earlier still, Pliny writes his History of Nature to study “the nature of things, that is, life”. He praises the ancient painter Zeuxis for creating grapes so real that birds would pick at them. 

still life and the Dutch golden age

Much thinking about still life has its roots in the Dutch golden age, so beautifully represented at the Ashmolean Museum. It is thoughtfully contextualized in Julie Berger Hochstrasser’s book, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age. She offers a sociohistorical critique of still life at this point in art history. She looks outside the frame, beyond symbolism, at what else is being shown in the fruits of global commerce represented in paintings of the time. There’s a tension between these gorgeous representations and the darker aspects of their trade history as commodities. Again, signifier and signified depend upon what the viewer brings.

Cezanne, still life and the postmodern

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Pot of Flowers and Pears 1890

In Cezanne’s studio in Provence, you get a sense of the working artist and can see some of the tableau settings for his still life paintings: the tables, the jugs, the light from the vast windows. The painting above, Cézanne’s Pot of Flowers and Pears, 1890, is part of the Cézanne collection at the Courtauld.

He uses here what might well be the back of another canvas to give the energy of diagonal and horizontal lines. In abstracting the backgrounds in this way, he has been seen as revolutionary. We have only to look though at some of the pre-Renaissance altarpieces to understand that our notions of modernity and postmodernity need rethinking. Artists of the twentieth century turn out not to be the first generation to make visible in art and call attention to the structures of representation, of framing – ultimately, of power.

unstill life in artworks studio practice

This expression of polarities, the real and the artificial, stillness and change, the internal and the external, the material and the immaterial is at the heart of our practice at the artworks studio.

Andrew Harrison’s exploration of forms of vitality links to this idea of un/still life, where a drawing or a sculpture capture a moment, poised with its potential for vitality, for movement, flow and change.

andrew harrison
riverbird
bronze, wax, lead 2021

Sarah Sutton’s botanical paintings aim to hold time like water in a vase. Their stillness implies the possibility of change and decay; transience, the essential unstillness of life.

sarah sutton
mother’s day lily
watercolour on tracing paper in plaster frame, 2023