The Importance Of Still Life Art

At first glance, Pieter Claesz’s oil on wood panel composition appears to be an elegant table scene that leaves the viewer with a desire for lightly salted crab served with a squeeze of lemon, a crusty roll and a quaff of Rhenish wine. To an extent, this painting is indeed a feast for the senses and a contemplation of fine food, temptingly presented amongst handsome dinnerware. Yet, by looking deeper into this beautifully rendered still life, it becomes apparent that a greater moral and religious message sits within this celebration of Dutch life and craftsmanship in the Seventeenth century.

The relations between art and life is explored throughout Martin McDonagh’s play, The Pillowman and Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent. They explore these relations through discussing the stylistic features of their characters and how these characters are perceived in real life. Both authors explore how the preconceived ideas of what a character should be is dismantled and the line which distinguishes between art and life is becoming less clear. Another way in which these authors explore the link between art and life is through the act of storytelling. This suggests that life is a form of art. Both texts deal with the argument of whether it is life that influences art or art that influences life. Some literary critics such as Henry James

In the photo “Lobster Dinner”, Weems reaches out to the man and does not eat anything, while the man concentrates on his lobster and the way he eats looks greedy and selfish. This is Weems favorite piece in the series. She explained that it symbolizes that in everyday life, man is taking and woman is giving. The poses they made in the photos are highly constructed, but also like a documentary. In my point of view, this dramatic style reflects people’s mental activities in a stronger way and it allows viewers to involve themselves to the photos emotionally. That’s why this artwork looks more real than

In David’s painting there is a clarity and crispness that is similar to a photograph, yet his figures maintain a baby like softness. Gerard’s implied texture of the clothes and environment are softer than David’s giving the painting a more realistic appearance. David and Gerard both show in these paintings that they have a very good understanding of human anatomy and form. The figures in both painting have a good sense of underlying structure and weight.

In the essay Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still-Life Painting Celeste Brusati organizes in a way that shows three different types of still lifes and how they can help identify an artist. She starts by showing the lesser of the extreme of artists who are impersonal in their works, and then goes on to show examples of those who are much more personal and more self representative in their works. What Brusati argues is that still life paintings perpetuate the social identity of the artist, and how a portrait can be a pictorial representation of them.

Frans Snyders created the painting Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market, 1614. At first glance, the painting depicts a horde of dead animals on top of a table, morbidly displayed. With the abundance of food placed on the table, the small section of the painting with the child pickpocketing creates a sense of enragement in the viewers. The animals set on the table such as the swan and the hog notify the readers that these animals are not for common people, but for the wealthy. Setting the painting before a fancy dinner, and in the process before has the viewers infer of the good life of those eating the animals but the struggle of the man and the boy.

In the 1950's food photography was still fresh and new with each frame filled with fussy dishes of molded meat and fancy confections. Over the years, the frames became less filled and the dishes more detailed until the unrealistically perfect dishes of the 1980's and 90's. Today, food photography is more focused, less fussy, and a great way to show off a brand's signature

The mundane setting of the painting was created purposefully to give the viewer a sense of calm. By painting a somewhat familiar scene to those that may have viewed it during this time period, the artist was able to allow the viewer to interject themselves directly into the painting. The nature of the geese as well as the maiden in the photo make it appear as if they were candidly captured with a camera in the middle of their daily routine. Unlike the Renaissance or other art periods that preceded Impressionism, the goal of the painting was not to convey any ideas, political beliefs, or promote one’s nationalism. The goal in this essence was to create a painting that captured a ‘scene’, which was done eloquently enough to allow the viewer to ‘transplant’ themselves directly into the scene if desired. The prowess of the painter was not meant to be evident in the painting. In fact, it is the mundane nature of the painting that is designed to make the viewer refrain from drawing any critical analysis of its curator.

Food evokes human's feelings. Humans go beyond the fact that creating a cuisine takes work and get to the values of the implied work. We learn to recognize the value and work to describe and understand our connection with foods, the ways in which they are expressed. This begins the conversation that connects people and inspired actions based on human experience grounding food to be a social experience in the humanities. Humans eat commonly even if it is not the same types of food, but it is food that joins people together making them similar to every human's regular routine of eating. Essentially stating that eating makes people

Artwork is one of the main ways to express the culture of a region or a country. Therefore, art has played a very important role throughout history. When talking about art, the first thing that comes to most people’s mind is probably that art is a painting or it is a sculpture. However, art has many forms of expression, and it closely connects to human’s daily life. Besides paintings and sculptures, art is everywhere around us. I am always interested in how people have linked art with daily life throughout history. For this reason, the two pieces of artwork I chose from my visit to the Museum of Fine Arts are both objects that can be used in everyday life: one is the mixing bowl and the other a incense burner. Though they are from different cultures, have different making processes, and have different purpose in usage, they both are good examples to show how artists tried to apply art using different techniques to human’s daily life.

Warren Belasco, in his scholarly book, Food: The Key Concepts, highlights the way in which the food we consume affects our lives more than we actually realize. Using his own text with a combination of enhancement materials such as quotes and pictorial diagrams, Belasco is able to relay the fact that the food industry is one of the most predominant in The United States of America. Shifting between both scholarly and casual tones, Belasco is able to relate to his audience members by providing everyday examples in which we use food as a means of conversation, socialization, and more. Upon reviewing chapter one of the piece, entitled “Why Study Food?” , it is clear that Belasco strives to highlight just how “civilization itself is impossible without

The piece is a collection of place settings made up of a plate, utensils, a goblet, and a unique runner for each setting located on three long dining tables that are places on a tiled floor, yet there is much more to the piece than meets the eye. First off the three long dining tables have purposely been set up in a perfect triangle which is “a primordial symbol of women hood as well as equality” (Arnason 576). This is a simple yet effective nod to two of the principles that the feminist art movement were striving for. Going even further, each table respectively represent a period in history, one presenting early history to the Roman Empire, another Christianity to Reformation, and finally American Revolution to the feminist movement. The piece also uses media that for the most part had been relegated to the realm of craftwork which was needlework and china painting. Each place setting has the name of an important female figure embroidered on the runner “in a style appropriate to its figure’s historical era” (Arnason 576). Along with the embroidered names are perfectly embroidered triangles at each of the three corners that have a repeating triangle shape on the inside, again contributing to the women hood and equality ideal. Complementing the embroidered names are thirty-nine hand painted plates each with a relatively unique design on them. These designs

Notwithstanding anyone specific expertise or knowledge of painting technique, each of us can quantify beauty as it relates to art in our own minds. We can see the growth of art and how it provokes emotion, understanding, and experimentation over time. Over the course of time, it appears that art, artist, and the lovers of the various periods of art seem to move beyond a name or basic aesthetics of style and venture into a deeper more comparative analysis of the work and its position in our culture.

The portrait is displayed horizontally with a gold trimmed frame. The subject is a female that looks to be in her early 20’s sitting upright on a large brown chair. If the viewer travels up the painting the first indication of the woman’s class is her satin, blue dress. The saturated blue shines and falls in the light like water. Paired with the dress are her exceptionally detailed endings to her sleeves. The lace is even painted as though it is translucent, allowing a little of the blue dress to show through the sleeve. Flowers throughout history have symbolized innocence of a woman and her virginity. The repeating theme of flowers, in the sleeve cuffs and ribbon) in the woman’s attired suggests her purity or innocent nature. Another very details section of the painting includes the corset/torso details. The sewing suggests texture in the torso with small beading in between. Towards the top of the chest in the center, the female seems to bear an extravagant, ribbon piece with a tear drop bead in the center. The light pink

I went to The Art Institute of Chicago on a Thursday when it was free for Illinois resident and when there were different exhibitions going on. There was long line at the entrance near the museum at 6pm in the evening. I went alone because I thought I can have better focus on picking a good art work. I was ready to go through all the magnificent paintings for my art museum paper. As I walked through the museum, there were colorful Indian Modern art exhibited for the occasion. They were big and vibrant. The was also a special exhibition of Tarsila Do Amaral, one of the leading Latin American Modernist artist who paint like Cubism, Futurism and expressionism. Her artworks were childlike in terms of the painting style of objects and people. I was most fond of the modernist and contemporary part of the gallery with painters like Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon. I was fascinated with Salvador Dali’s Venus de Milo with Drawers. The drawers unnaturalistically located on a human body was intriguing. The depth of the human mind and subconsciousness are creatively represented by these drawers on Venus de Milo. Francis bacon’s work Figure with meat was not bad either. Figure with Meat is a disturbing depiction of Pope Innocent X sat in front of a cow carcass cut lengthways in half. (Gould) Like his other painting, the theme is dark and twisted. The carcass is included serve as a direct reminder that death will be at the end await