still life
I approach the genre of still life by searching for the newness and freshness of unmediated experience. By newness, I mean the vitality and the taking over of something real from the world in a particular context. I feel that still life painting should always be a fresh language and an open experience where anything can happen on the canvas.
I want a still life to be raw and immediate with the idiom of "style" stripped away, leaving the object open and exposed. I don't want a still life painting that is full of clichés, because to me doing something predictable is not worth doing at all. The idea of photographic influence is absent from my painting; that which is a set menu of novelties. As far as I'm concerned, a sense of "rightness" in paint can only be found in the imperfect and approximate.
Flowers are my subjects of choice for a still life because they provide color, shape, form and life.