Still Life at SAM

Banquet Piece c. 1675 Abraham Hendricksz van Beyeren (Seattle Art Museum)

    Still in the afterglow of reading Mark Doty's Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, I visited the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) last week to enjoy the experience of standing in front of the museum's one still-life painting. Days beforehand, I imagined myself there at the museum, overwhelmed by light and color and richness and intimacy and meaning just like Doty was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Did I forget somehow that I was not a prize-winning American poet--or any kind of poet at all?
  I arrived at the museum knowing that the painting was European, but not knowing which floor or gallery held this painting. I wanted to wander the three floors of art and walk myself back in time from contemporary and post-Modern to the 17th century; I wanted to travel from Seattle to Africa to France to Italy and to Holland.
Ah, there it was, in a beautiful gilt frame. I stood before it looking looking looking.
   It was a busy painting, a bit too busy for my taste, so it took quite a while to explore the canvas, to identify all the components, to begin to figure out how one thing related to another. I looked and stared and gazed. And I waited for something to happen. Niets. I was not having the Doty experience. I was disappointed. I paid $15 admission plus parking to have an experience. I had sent copies of Doty's book to a family and friends. I just stood there wishing someone would come in and clean up this mess of  a feast. What a rube. What a fool. I knew better.
   So I planted my feet and kept looking. I pulled out my camera, disabled the flash, and took many close-up photographs. I needed to look for myself to see what I saw not what Doty had prepared me to see.
   Here, then,  is the gold watch and pomegranate:

And here is the figure of the artist reflected in the curved shape of the silver pitcher:

 And here is the lemon and its tendril of peel somehow "talking" with the folds of the burgundy and white table cloths to its right and the cluster of red grapes to its left:

And here is a goblet of white wine catching the light from the window:

 And here is Beyeren's oysters and lemon (left)--for certain an acknowledgement of Jan Davidsz de Heem's Still Life with A Glass and Oysters of 1640 (right).

  And then...I could hardly believe my eyes. There were the clouds! There! Look! Out the window behind the thick green drape: 

  Clouds never appear in still lifes! Neither do windows! There's always some invisible source of light illuminating the objects arranged on the tables. Look at this "classic" still life. See what I mean?

Still Life with Gilt Cup by Willem Claesz.

  The window is never in the painting. But here was a window showing actual clouds, not just a wash of blue sky or butterscotch-colored sunlight. Still Life with Clouds! 

   And then I starting seeing how the light from this window was reflected in all the shiny objects on the table. Look!

 Now the painting was alive and my eyes were dancing all over its surface looking for the reflection of the window. And, strangely, it was an asymmetrical light--three panes of a four-paned, two-over-two window. And, even stranger, this could not be the reflection of the window with the green curtain and clouds. That reflection would take a different shape and would, based on the location of the window, be reflected on the backsides of the objects on the table. There was another window somewhere "off stage" being captured, curved, elongated, truncated, and bent by the artist in every vessel in the painting.

   What does it all mean? Why did Beyeren include the window here? The curatorial notes next to this work offer no clues, but I can think of three reasons: 1) it balances the very dark space behind the arched doorway next to it, 2) it provides a visual "breath of fresh air" to a claustrophobic table setting--an escape of sorts for the viewer, 3) he wanted me to be happy.

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon...and Clouds

   From the moment I started reading Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, I knew I was going to start re-reading this book the minute I finished it. Poetry is like that and, apparently, so is this lucid memoir and meditation by poet Mark Doty.

 I quoted from Doty’s book in an earlier blog about my unwieldy collection of cloud photographs and the strange new art of virtual collections.  Though Doty does not write about clouds per se, his thoughts on still life painting are of interest to me as the working title of my next book is Still Life with Clouds.

 I have never heard of Doty until I read a New York Times article by Rob Walker, which quoted him and mentioned his book. Though Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is ostensibly about a still life painting by 17^th-century Dutch painter Jan Davidsz de Heem, Doty moves gracefully from the canvas to explore the art of seeing, intimacy, beauty, and life.

 I  began reading this slim seventy-page essay on the runway before taking off from Seattle to Denver and finished its last sentence as my connecting flight touched down in Washington, DC.  Travel time was about eight hours, but I lost all awareness of time as I read sections of Doty’s beautiful book, contemplated his ideas, stared out the window, took notes, read several more pages, napped, read some more, thought of all the people to whom I would give copies of this book.

 And now my problem. Explaining, paraphrasing, summing up, describing Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. What I would really like to do is start with page one and retype the entire book here for you to savor. It’s that beautiful and irreducible. However, I will start with a quote.

 “…I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will;  I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held with an intimacy with things of this world.”

Still Life with Clouds (photo by M. Ruth through a sailboat window)

 Strangely, this is what comes over me when I look at a cloud. Strangely, because a cloud is not still, not alive, and too distant really for intimacy.
  Yet, I find the clouds as compelling and inviting as the painting Doty has fallen in love with--a small canvas composed of shucked oysters, curling lemon peels, a cluster of grapes, and a shining goblet of wine—not water droplets and ice crystals constantly moving, constantly changing form. Jan Davidsz de Heem’s painting captures a table set 350 years ago, forever fixing the relationship between carefully arranged object. The curls of lemon peel will always curl just so, the lemon wedge will always rest on the grapes, the glistening oysters will never stray from the edge of the brown wooden table, everything will remain clustered around the sparkling goblet, the light will never change, and decay will never taint the soft, ripe air. 

 Yet still-life paintings are never still, even though the living things in them have been stilled—the lemon and grapes plucked, the oyster shucked, the greenery cut, and the wine long ago separated from the life-giving vine. Our restless imaginations go to work changing them—warming wine, shriveling the oysters, drying the lemon, browning the grapes. We hear the buzz of the fly, smell the fragrance of decay, see the hands of servant or artist himself clearing and resetting the table, shaking out the tablecloth.

 We keep the still life moving by adding the element of time to the painting. And though the stories of the artist and his feast are lost to us, we enliven the feast with our own stories. We reach for the goblet, taste the wine, recall our first oyster (maybe also our last), think about the oyster beds, the ocean bays and inlets, the vineyard, the window where the sun pours in from the left, what is outside the window. We break the serene silence of the still life with sounds of the market, the clopping horses on the cobblestones, the gulls, the fruit vendors, and (because we cannot help ourselves) fish mongers and huge wooden clogs. I am looking at Jan de Heem’s painting now, the one on the back cover of Mark Doty’s book, and this is exactly what happened.
  So what exactly happened? A kind of intimacy. With the painting, with the eye of the painter. And with the "I" of the painter. We inhabit for a brief time the soul of the painter. We see through him.
    From the experience of looking at this particular painting, Doty moves to wonderful stories of his grandmother's striped peppermint candies, of other still-life paintings, lost loves, yard sales, of chipped blue-and-white platter, and new loves. And they all express the highest value: intimacy.

“...what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within...But then why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it?  A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection: we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world.
A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them—but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.”  

    This is the banquet Doty lays out for his readers--a feast for a cloud watcher studying themes of restlessness and sense of place.

National Gallery of Clouds

I cannot tell you the name of the artist who painted this masterpiece. I cannot tell you the name of this painting or any of the paintings I have posted here from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. My head was in the clouds. I was blind to everything but clouds. And I was pretty obnoxious about it.
   As I toured room after room of masterpieces with my friend Amy last week, she would lead me to her favorite works in each room, tell me why she liked it, and I would say, "Nice clouds!" She would look up from where she was reading the placards of information placed beneath each frame and say, "Oh, I never noticed before." An hour later, she was saying "Stop it! You are ruining these paintings for me!"

What horses?

What nudes?



What fields?



Too much foreground greenery.

Looks like a front moving in. He better hurry.



Look! The happy clouds--cumulus humilis!



An actual artist copying a dynamic skyscape (some would say seascape) where beatifully illuminated cumulus congestus loom threateningly over a wave-tossed sailboat. Though it seems the sailboat is the focus of this painting, it is actually the dark cloud rising above it. It's hard to imagine all of these paintings without clouds. A clear blue sky would take all the oomph out of them. Clouds set the mood, the season, the weather, and sometimes the location of the land- or sea-scape. Clouds bring a strong dynamic element to each painting. They mean something is happening in the painting--the clouds are rising, lowering, moving on unseen winds. In certain paintings, clouds compel the viewer to regard the subject of the painting--be it horses, riders, frolickers, sailors, meadows--as alive and interacting with or responding to the weather. The horses must be wet and the riders cold. The skin of the summer nudes must be sun-warmed; the luscious clouds are body-shaped. The crops and fields will soon get a drenching rain; everyone will relax. Villagers are enjoying lunch inside their cool stucco homes, seeking refuge from the baking sun on this nearly cloudless day. The rider on the long path needs to hurry. The bees pollinating the flowers in the field do not; they have all day to buzz in the hot sun. Alas, I did not. I wanted to linger in the galleries, revisit all my favorite paintings to see what role clouds played in them. But I had a plane to catch the next morning back to Olympia. As much as I hate to leave, I enjoy my flights. I always chose a window seat. I spend most of the long flight with my nose pressed up against the window wondering what these clouds and their shadows mean to the people going about their lives below.