Kitchen Still Life and Looking at the Overlooked
I’m interested in the way things are when the light lands on them. I’m interested in the ordinary and what happens when we notice it, how the noticing then spirals into the nooks and crannies of the rest of a regular or not so regular day.
I’m interested in how we notice how one thing affects another. If we look at clouds, studies show we’re likely to be happier. At least I remember reading something like that once, long ago. It’s not really the looking at clouds per se that makes you happier, but that you took a moment to register them. Writers are people who are ‘noticers’ but lots of people are.
I like to think of the ordinary, our life, that is, as one giant composition. Things are moving in it all the time, and we balance things out, we navigate blind, we try, we muddle, we F things up. We freaking continue. We are flawed and real and no one really notices anything about us and we have to be okay with that. We love and we hate and are consumed by past mistakes. We hope and we try again and things go on around us and we feel stalled and yet we know we are so much more, so much more beautiful than we know or feel.
What happens when we notice people and things and maybe art that isn’t normally given much attention? What if we made a point of looking at the overlooked? Still life is the overlooked genre, or at least it has been traditionally. And women’s art! Well, we know that it’s been overlooked and continues to be. I recently downloaded the free book from Art Canada Institute on Mary Hiester Reid and have been loving her work especially Morning Sunshine 1913 and Chrysanthemums.
You can read her bio here.
Most of us start our days in the kitchen. It starts here. We pour a bowl of cereal, some milk. We drink our coffee in silence or with some music. Some of us are hurrying, responsible for other souls, trying to get them on their way.
It depends where you live, maybe it’s still dark when you go out into the world, assume your work persona.
I don’t usually head off to work until noon. Usually. Which affords me the opportunity to absorb the morning light. It allows me to sit and think about artists such as Mary Hiester Reid. It allows me to look at her images and wonder about how her whole trajectory might have changed if this or that person had noticed her. (It means that I miss other times of day, other angles of light coming in through my kitchen window…)
I have to admit it grieves me that we go on not noticing these artists who made such poetry, who noticed things with such intensity and beauty and who transformed their own lives and those who look at their work. But I guess it was always so. It will always be so. And we create things, truly, to transform our own lives. And that is significant. And that is a life well lived.
I feel so invisible. I am invisible. This is humbling. This is profound. We go on, we can’t go on, we go on, we eat peaches, we wait for…..godot, we wait, westward ho, we walk around tables until eleven o’clock, we speak simply, eat simply, there are plums, there are plums, we try our best. We fail, we fail better. Fail lovelier. We fail and fail and flail and ail.
I miss so much. And I want so much more. Please send me news of all that I have missed.
