Robert Francis James

Unlike a painting, food is an impermanent, fleeting art form. ― Julie Piatt Ever since the cave painters of Lascaux , painters have depicted food. Picasso was no exception. But while depictions of food in still-lifes had traditionally celebrated abundance, Picasso’s depictions—at least during World War II—were meant to remind viewers of an opposite state, deprivation . Like all fellow citizens, Picasso experienced relentless deprivation during the Occupation of Paris , when the foodstuffs trucked into the city were commandeered by the Nazis, leaving residents to get by on mere table scraps and the meager yields from backyard box gardens and chicken coops. So it was no surprise to his friends that Picasso painted still-lifes of food throughout the Occupation, four hard years when a “growling stomach was the Frenchman’s true voice,” as the writer Alfred Fabre-Luce said. “There was nothing to do but work and struggle for food,” Picasso told Vogue at Paris’ Liberation , “and look ...

Der Mensch ist was er isst . — Ludwig Feuerbach I’m delighted to announce my first solo show opens next week and continues through February at the Newark Arts Alliance . I hope you can attend. Here’s my exhibition statement, to whet your appetite. The parietal painters at Lascaux could have depicted anything: they chose food. Food has forever consoled us. We are what we eat, and what we eat often softens life’s edges—momentarily, at least.  Moms, grandmas, and food makers count on it. I’m lovin’ it, they hope we’ll say. It’s magically delicious. It melts in your mouth. It’s finger lickin’ good. It’s the real thing. But while food combats emptiness, it reminds us of la condition humaine : we are creatures of relentless desire, but our comforts, at best, are cold ones. They cannot fill our unending emptiness. Food is frighteningly fugitive. Above: The Seven Ups . Oil on fiberboard. 8 x 10 inches. The post Cold Comforts appeared first on Original still life oil painting...

Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it. — Danny Kaye This week I observed Philadelphia artist Cheryl Schlenker demonstrate her technique for floral painting. I won’t disclose all her trade secrets, but will share that her painting began pretty wildly, at least in comparison to the way I start a painting. First, she lathered her blank canvas—in reality, a big bristol board—with gesso and some vivid acrylic paints squeezed straight from the tube. She mixed the two together, and then began slashing and scraping the mixture with a beefy rubber potter’s rib. From there she continued to paint on top of her surface with a large brush and more acrylic colors that she squeezed straight from the tube. She painted her floral painting in about two hours, without a reference of any kind. From her confident pours, scrapes, and brushstrokes, you could tell she’d ridden in this rodeo before. And she spared no paint. Watching Ms. Schlenker paint reminded me of the orig...

Despondency breaks off its course. Anguish breaks off its course. The vulture breaks off its flight. The eager light streams out, Even the ghosts take a draught. And our paintings see daylight. — Tomas Tranströmer Painting is like a walk in the woods. You set out full of hope with only a blank canvas. It’s bright and airy and meadowlike. You pick up a brush and choose a woodpath. Your first few marks feel promising and offer to become the armature upon which you’ll build a masterpiece. But, quite soon, the path leads downhill—and into darkness. None of your marks are making sense. More paint doesn’t clarify, and erasures only make your murky and miserable painting murkier and more miserable. You begin to suspect the armature; you begin to suspect the painter. They’re neither of them any good. You chose the wrong path and now there’s no way out of the woods. You make more strokes and more strokes and more, stabbing in the dark like a blinded creature. You’re hopeles...

Why is it awful for a painter today to create an impressionist painting? It’s not because they’re painting it badly; it’s because they don’t have a reason to paint it. — Matthew Ritchie I sometimes hear other artists—more skilled than I—say that they’d like to paint more often, but don’t know what to paint. Somewhere along the line, I tell them, I received this excellent advice: Paint things with personal meaning and you’ll never get stuck. That advice has never failed me. At least not yet. My painting Jug & Book , for example, includes a small stoneware crock, an object I love for its rough, unromantic quality. Jug & Book also includes an 18th-century leather-bound book that my late cousin gave me when I was a kid. It reminds me of him and the lifelong love we shared for antiques. It’s a curious book , full of the rules and maxims for genteel conversation in Georgian England. In his 1981 book The Meaning of Things, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the discove...

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience. —Mark Rothko A 1950 marketing stunt made the phrase “Kodak moment” synonymous with the word experience , in the sense marketers use that word today. An experience , marketers say, is a staged event . A Kodak moment in the 1950s, consumers understood, was a staged event in a family’s life; and the photo—no matter its quality—a souvenir of the event . In other words, a memento. “Our job is to convince them that every picture is important,” Kodak’s marketing brief said at the time. “We must raise the value of memories.” Ron’s Kodak Moment It’s staging we so dislike about the selfie and the TikTok video, 2022’s versions of the Kodak moment. They’re always so faux and so harrowingly inauthentic. That’s why no one ever confuses a fine-art photograph—much less a painting—with a consumer’s Kodak moment, even though the professional photographer and the artist “stages” her subject (preferring to call it “de...

The post Solo Show appeared first on Original still life oil paintings for sale l Robert Francis James .