Research on still life.

– Research on still life.

Historical still life.

For this research point we need to research into traditional approaches to still life and get an idea of the genre we’re entering to learn more about it. For this I did some research first looking into the more traditional and historical artists and how they took approaches onto still life.

Firstly I came across an artist called Evaristo Baschenis with his piece of work called ‘Still-life with Musical Instruments and a Statuette’ this was done with oil on canvas in 1660. This piece was done with dull lighting and a realistic take on the image in front of the artist. Seeing this artist has shown me that in the 1600’s the representation of still life was realistic and shown exactly how shown when viewing.

In the image above you can see the accurate representation of the lighting, it shows the tone and colours changing matching the lighting entering the image. Seeing this artist’s work and looking into various different types of work in these era’s, I found that historical artists did more realistic representations of the layout ahead of them, the work they did was accurate in the lighting and the toning on the objects. The colours used are more dark toned and the lighting is done which is a common feature of still life in this century for it to be dark with little lighting.

I then came across an artist called Paul Cézanne, the piece I came across was called Still-life with Bowl of Fruit done with oil pastels on canvas this piece was done in 1893. This piece of work shows off how it was shown back in the 1800’s for still life and how the representation of the style was.

As shown in the image above the still life form was more traditional as in it was done to accuracy and done as a realistic representation of the image the artist would see. The imagery is bright and coloured with more primary colours than the previous artist I came across in the 1600’s, the work seems less realistic but still has the accurate toning and contrast on the objects. The lighting in this picture is more bright and the full image has more lighting than the previous, the toning and dark tones are only in the areas of shadows.

Contemporary still-life.

Finding a more contemporary famous still life artist was more complicated therefore I went on google and did my research throughout that platform, when doing this research I found that all types of contemporary art were so much different to the past centuries, modern still life art is more bright and different, artists have had a new way of seeing this type of art and changing it’s view, it doesn’t have to be an accurate representation of what you see it can be formed into whatever you imagine. Different media’s are used and new technique’s.

With this image by Laurie Justus Pace called ‘Early Morning Tea’ it shows the brightness and different techniques contemporary artists use and get inspired by. For this piece of art I found it fun and it still represented the items the artist was looking at when creating this art. I think that the techniques in her use of the brush really show the different style to the previous decades.

The materials we use today on our art are different, the way we express are is more imaginative and we use colour to light up an image and show an object for a different way than it really is, in the 1600’s they would express art through realistic form and create art to look real. But as decades went on we now explore art in different ways, the colours we use, the lighting we use the techniques within our materials are new. We show things for what they are but use different ways to express our sights. We use different materials and use them in different techniques to create expression, the composition hasn’t changed much, we still line objects up and create different ways to place them yet we change the way we represent things.