Still Life

There is a magic and calmness involved in painting objects. For me it is almost a relief to paint something from life that has no opinion about itself. There is nothing to pull out of a back corner of my brain and squeeze through the small aperture that connects imagination with real tools. It is simply a matter of painting what I see. OK, sometimes that’s not quite as easy as it sounds, but it is more direct than conjuring it out of the smoke of my internal vision. And then there is the life that wakes up in inanimate objects when one starts painting them. They take on attributes and develop character. And yet they will never look askance at their portraits. My happiness with them and what I invest in them is purely invention— but it’s a pretty good invention.

All images will enlarge & many have stories