Still life
Artist
Joan Jamson
(American)
Date1983
MediumWatercolor
Dimensions19 × 22 in. (48.3 × 55.9 cm)
ClassificationsDrawing
Object numberUAC2737
DescriptionA quintessential watercolor still life, depicting a pot surrounded by several pieces of fruit that are placed against a red cloth backdrop. All the forms of this piece are delineated more by loose color boundaries than the harsh lines or black outlines of traditional works. This lack of hard lines gives everything a fuzzy, cloudlike quality that can be best seen in the lemon-esque shapes in the lower half of the painting. The point that really catches the eye of the viewer, however, is the pot in the middle. More white space than color, and more shape than line, the pot almost seems luminous against the darker cloth and the shadows of the fruit.Still lives, through the history of painting, have been a popular subject matter to show off an artist’s technical skills and how they render forms in space. The most well known, and symbolically dense, of these were created by the Dutch during the Renaissance. However, modern artists like Picasso and Cezanne took the subject of the still life and used it to explore painting in other ways that reflected their interest in the act of painting rather than the objects they painted. Here, Jamson continues to explore those interests with an even more modern eye as she works with color and white space on the canvas.
Written by Alex Heath
