[Still Life with Pink Bottle and Flower Bulbs.
watercolor. 9x12". June 2012. © Bullock Online 2012]
"On a superficial view the still-life attempts nothing save the true-to-nature portrayal of familiar things. But deeper insight does not miss the symbolic and the decorative function. All art symbolizes or decorates in one way or another. Blossoming flowers, ripe fruit remind one of the gifts of creative nature, of increase, growth and genesis."
- Max J. Friedlander, Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life: Their Origin & Development, 1949
A happy occurrence for me — achieving the seemingly contradictory goals of (a.) straightforward depiction and (b.) refinement of the object(s) to clarify the subject and the composition. “Fidelity and simplification”, as my friend Margaret Krug recently put it to me.
Painters have to be editors, and I find that painting is a process of abstracting generalities out of tangled reality. A building can be depicted without describing each and every brick. A wash of color, by the way it is handled, can mean different things — it is not a brick wall but it can depict a brick wall. Observational painting creates a natural abstraction and I find this fascinating and exciting.
