National Gallery Visit

Last week I  visited the National Gallery to take a look at the use of objects in still life paintings. In 17^th century still life paintings some objects had clear symbolic meanings such as the skull which reminds the viewer of the certainty of death and others had more associative value such as the presence of Saint Sebastian and Cupid in Willem Kalf’s Still Life with Drinking-Horn which link it to the guild of archers it was commissioned by. Some paintings dealt more obviously with the vanitas themes of death, the transience of life and the futility of pleasure but others, whilst including certain vanitas objects, were more concerned with showing off the patron’s wealth. The idea of the vanitas still life comes from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes (1:2): 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity'.  In these paintings books symbolise human knowledge, musical instruments the pleasures of the senses. Collector’s objects such as shells symbolise wealth and clocks and lamps the transience of human life.

Writing about still life painting in the 18th century  R.G Saisselin comments that there was an ‘assumption of the universality of communication and reason’. In todays postmodern 21^st century society this is not an assumption I can make when it comes to my own work! He also states that ‘the presitge of painting at the end of the 18^th century owed much to the notion that its primary function was to illustrate thought.' This made me think about what I want my images to do. Should they exist simply to be ‘translated’ by the viewer into words and ideas? The danger of rejecting the idea of image as language is that it may lead into the modernist ‘image as aethetic art object’. I somehow want to find the middle ground of creating images which while they may encourage an intellectual response containing discursive, narrative, representational and imitative elements also effect the viewer in deeper more subconscious and emotive ways.