Still Life

I don’t use the table any more. Well I can’t, it’s covered with so many half-finished projects that there isn’t a bare or flat space on it. I pass the table many times a day, so have to look at it.
The still life of objects would not, in any other situation, find themselves together. Well, maybe in a junk shop, or at the tip.

Still Life, I never really understood that term. I remember those dark paintings on the duller pages of glossy art books, they were of fruit and bowls, jugs and bottles, the occasional dead animal, sometimes a book or instrument, all arranged on a table, as if in mid-use. I never believed them; the slice of life looked staged. And why still life? Everything is inanimate in a painting, or so it seemed to me. Possibly there is imperceptible movement as the paint slowly dries and shrinks, as the
egg and vegetable matter decays; and then a slight pulling away from the canvas, so movement takes place. But that would be the same with all paintings,including the still lives. I preferred the paintings where something seemed to be in the process of happening.

‘So you see,’ my mother would instruct, ‘in the paintings you like, the artist has an animate subject. The subject of a still life does not move. The artist develops their skill and technique by painting the daily objects from life; they need to be still so the artist can look at them more easily. Try it, go and draw an apple, it will help you to pay attention.’

It didn’t, and Still Life still did not make sense. Not just because of the dead things that might be there, (how could that be life?) What about the paintings of people who just sat or lay still? And landscapes, they were still, weren’t they?

Of course I understand now, I always was a slow learner. You understand everything eventually, if you live long enough. Understanding is such an anti-climax. So it was only that all along. 
The landscapes and portraits and abstracts and all those other sorts of paintings,they show us the idea of life happening, participation in the act of living,thinking, changing. Still Life can’t change.

My still life and I are preserved in a moment of time, we can’t go back or forward. I could change things; I could clear everything from the table, but I as I stand over it and consider what might be removed, it becomes apparent that all is essential just where it is.

The inner tube on the yellow newspaper, a complicated Swiss knife-like tool and tinned tyre repair kit next to it, looking as though someone has just put them down for a moment and will soon return to complete the task. Look more closely and the dust says that this will never happen now.

The half-finished jigsaw, mine actually, the others claimed to hate those pointless activities I took so much pleasure in. Every now and again I’ll slot another piece in, but somehow that doesn’t produce the same sense of pleasure as when there was someone to tut at my triumph or to point out another piece that might fit. So there it sits, half a Caravaggio, a copy of a copy of a copy of sumptuous fruit, the bloom on the grapes hold a moment, a memory, of when the actual grape lived. Perhaps Caravaggio himself ate the real fruit. Devoured it, I think, juice running down his chin, he strikes me as being that sort of eater.

A memory of our own dining days is on the table, the cut glass mustard holder, with a tarnished silver lid, a little slot in this for the tiny spoon. I see now that the crevices of the glass are black with dust, the substance within may still be mustard. We all enjoyed the object, for the way it looked and the mustard itself, nothing like a bit of fire on your tongue to remind you that you had one. It would wash up nicely, but then what? No, best to leave it where it is, I wouldn’t want to disturb the
dust.

Behind the brass vase, empty, a wedding present; is the heavy, gold-coloured cigarette lighter. Who smokes today?  It is engraved, a twenty-first birthday present, what sort of gift is that?  Of course we didn’t know better in those days, always the excuse, for everything. It has his name on it, I like to think of all those years it was a gentle weight in his pocket and the way he would pull it out with a flourish when a flame was required. All those pubs, and parties, chilly grey streets, car journeys to places that had had significance once; he would hold its weighty warmth and hear the satisfying click as the fuel ignited. He would smoke at the table too, sometimes sitting back in his chair, dreamily, thinking, of something. Or leaning forward, energetically explaining a new plan, haloed in smoke; always so much better in the talking than the doing.Bits of paper scrawled with pencil drawings and calculations of half-remembered ideas fill every gap between the bulkier objects. A plan for new system of stairs, ‘We don’t need a builder, I can do this easily.’ 

The often imagined Japanese teahouse for the garden.

‘Carriage riding in the park!  You can do a course and I’ll find out about stabling.’

Oh the life we were going to live. All those animated conversations over the table, half-eaten meals, minutes turning to hours. Me, tetchy, then won round. The children, tiptoeing away to their own
projects, leaving us talking into the night.

He was always so full of life. ‘He’s a one,’ neighbours would say to me, not always nicely.

Now I’m a one.

No, the table can stay as it is. I don’t have much of an appetite these days anyway, a cup of tea and a biscuit,soup and a hunk of bread. I like a bit of fresh fruit.

I have a sort of still life close to me as I sit in the armchair now: a china cup, a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on it and some black grapes in a filmy cover of bloom, all wait on a tray.  The accidental composition is pleasing.

Still life; yes, it is, still life.

Domestic Detail in the House of Dreams