Still Life and Silence

5/14/2016

Pieter Claez Still Life with Wine Glass and Silver Bowl oil on panel 1635

I have been reading about Pieter Claez, and thinking about the silence of still life paintings. Still Life is the quietest of genres: an entrance to the world of objects, observations of the things around us, those mute possessions that are always still, yet not without experience, which is a kind of living. Claez's almost monochromatic paintings with their solemn, silvery-golden light are the direct predecessors, I think, to similarly spare and remarkably silent paintings by Chardin, Peale, and Morandi.