Still Life Quotes

I remember borrowing my mum's Instamatic 110 camera as a kid and doing still lifes of tennis balls and benches and thinking they were going to be something really amazing. They ended up being really bad.

... life, by definition, is never still.

While Jesus is saving, I'm spending all my daysin backgrounds and landscapes with the languages of saints.While people are spinning like toys on Christmas day,I'm inside a still life with the other absentee.

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.

Photographing a cake can be art.

What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.

To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space.

I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Years ago - in the 70s, for about a decade - I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.

Living and working for four decades in a Bologna apartment and studio he shared with his unwed sisters, Morandi painted little but bottles, boxes, jars, and vases. Yet like that of Chardin and the underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi's work seems to slow down time and show you things you've never seen before.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

My paintings are loosely based on meta narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still life's become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.

Still ending, and beginning still.

Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

... landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well.

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

The microscopes that magnified the tears, studied warts and all. Still life flows on.

When you are modelling, you are creating a picture, a still life, perhaps something like a silent film. You convey emotion but you are only using your body.

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.