still-life from the archive

 

Above: still-life painted on Heinz Koppel’s easel in 2006. This is the same foliate-head jug I recently painted in Arenig.

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I’ve been producing still-life intermittently almost from the beginning of my career as a painter. I have little flurries of activity when the genre completely absorbs me for a while, and then I stop until the next time. In the beginning it was a way to absorb biographical elements of my life… and of the lives of those close to me… into my painting. Later I began to paint still-life because I loved the formality, the arrangements of shapes almost always placed against a landscape. I find the process calms me. When we moved to Aberystwyth and stayed for a year with our friend Pip Koppel while we looked for a house, she and I worked in her pottery studio with clay, making earthenware for the kitchen of the house Peter and I would eventually purchase, Ty Isaf. Later Pip loaned me the studio of her late husband, Heinz Koppel, and for a few months at his easel I produced paintings of the earthenware I’d made in her workshop. I had to be really careful not to get any of my paint on the easel, which was tough because I am such a messy worker!

 

Today I’ve been trawling the archive for still-life images, and I’ve posted a good many of them on one of my Pinterest boards, HERE.

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