| Description |
My thesis documents the body of work I have built since May 2004. This work was the result of an exploration of the Still Life tradition since the l6th Century. I looked at; the unique aspects and historical evolution of the Still Life tradition from the 16th Century to the present. An examination of the work I have produced since 2004 will show the influence of several stylistic and conceptual movements over the past 500 years, particularly those; at the two ends of that chronology: The early Dutch and Old Master painters and the Pop Artists of the late 20th Century. Finally, I will review ways in which this body of work incorporates elements which make it personal and spiritual, giving it deeper meaning than it would otherwise have by just being an exercise in composition and rendering. I will also show how this phenomenon of incorporating deeper layers of personal, spiritual and even satirical meaning has been a part of this kind of painting since even before the term "Still Life" was coined. The point at which I discovered the unique capacity of Still Life painting for retaining multiple, simultaneous and sometimes contradictory layers of meaning was when I became particularly excited about its advantageousness as a means of personal expression, given my own interests in social satire, record keeping, and my particular interest in the ways which certain foods facilitate human intimacy, which I think of as a kind of spirituality. Spirituality is often a communal phenomenon, and our love of certain foods is many times an association with people, place and time. Personal spirituality is often experienced by means of our intimate associations with others. Those moments are sometimes marked by the consumption of some sort of food - in the case of my (Mormon) culture, that food is usually some kind of sugar. This body of work also touches on the perplexing and humorous ironies and contradictions of two cultures, one within the other: The Mormon cultural obsession with sugar (given the strictness with which we adhere to our own peculiar code of health) and the greater cultural phenomenon of an American population that is at once both obsessively health conscious and notoriously over nourished. |
