STILL LIFE

These paintings were begun while taking photographs for the Commons xeries. Struck by the vast amount of litter on the ground I started to make small studies from photographs of the crushed cans lying around. This led to these paintings in the tradition of still lives or nature pictures where the natural world has been corrupted.

They are a great exercise in rendering objects as the lens sees them and the discipline is in getting the paint to go where it needs to in order to ape the photos accurately.

“Like the sky-glow and distant traffic in the Commons Series, the litter is evidence of life. There are stories behind the discarded cans. Who dropped them? Kids? Clubbers? Businessmen? Were they shared with someone or were they drunk alone? Like the light-polluted sky of the Commons Series, this effect we have on the landscape is a result of how we live now.”