Today for my Influencing Me post I thought we might have a quick look at Still Life in art. My examples are paintings, but we are seeing more and more photographic still life as well.
Influencing Me – Still Life
If you like macro photography there is a good chance that you would also love still life art. There are a lot of similarities, though still life is more formal, I guess you could say.
Let’s see how Wikipedia defines it:
A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, etc.).[1]
With origins in the Middle Ages and Ancient Greco-Roman art, still-life painting emerged as a distinct genre and professional specialization in Western painting by the late 16th century, and has remained significant since then. One advantage of the still-life artform is that it allows an artist a lot of freedom to experiment with the arrangement of elements within a composition of a painting. Still life, as a particular genre, began with Netherlandish painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the English term still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven. Early still-life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. Later still-life works are produced with a variety of media and technology, such as found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound.
The term includes the painting of dead animals, especially game. Live ones are considered animal art, although in practice they were often painted from dead models. Because of the use of plants and animals as a subject, the still-life category also shares commonalities with zoological and especially botanical illustration. However, with visual or fine art, the work is not intended merely to illustrate the subject correctly.
Quick Post
I was going to do a whole heap of stuff on this for you today, however, I’ve been running around for my car today. Someone didn’t give way to me last week and hit me over the back wheel on the driver’s side. We thought they would just need to fix two panels and the door, but apparently, it isn’t that easy. The back wheel is bent and the suspension shot. We are waiting now to see if they will write it off. If they do then we have to start looking for another car. The joy. Just one more thing really.
So as you can imagine, I’m a bit distracted as I await the final decision for my car. We really want to get an electric car and was hoping that our current car would last, but no. Time will tell.
I have a few still life paintings for you. The painter and title should be with each one.
