Still Life, Life Still

Opening Reception: Sunday, September 12 | 4 PM – 6 PM

Click on the name of a featured artist to view their gallery:

Mary Ellen Bartley
Kate Emlen
Tucker Nichols
Jon Redmond
Margaret Sparrow

Still-life painting is defined as the depiction of inanimate objects for the sake of their qualities of form, colour, texture, and composition. I suspect the artists exhibited here will agree, but I also suspect all will agree that the five artists here care little about the definition. These artists bring so much more to the genre – and perhaps it to them.

During the pandemic, Jon Redmond kept close to home and found comfort in revisiting and exploring simple subjects close at hand -variations of the familiar. He paints and scrapes and repaints and creates not a painting of a thing, but a record of an event.

Mary Ellen Bartley was forced to leave Italy as the pandemic grew. She left the Morandi library and studio and quarantined in her attic studio creating a Morandi-inspired project – In Seven Things Again and Again she photographed the same seven objects every day of April. Her attic studio became a sanctuary from global anxiety. And the things on the table, a quiet alternate world, perfectly contained. Her Reading in Color series in its deliberate arrangements of used books chosen for their lush dyed page edges, textures, and sandwiched color forms, has a decidedly more vibrant and extroverted palette. “I find the color and the colorful titles a welcome escape from the relentlessly grim news cycle”.

Margaret Sparrow loves and finds beauty in everyday objects and the stillness and the light that surround them. Always in flux, Sparrow captures them and shows us that, like life, there is nothing still about it. ”It is as life itself, only one must take the time to look quietly and with care”.

Kate Emlen analyzes the still life and then brings to it a gorgeous color and point of view. Her statement, shown with her paintings, explains her process best. She questions space, form, color, texture and composition before and after painting-and then she paints. ”The doing of it is the thinking”.

Tucker Nichols captures the moment and creates one for people all over the globe. During Covid his project was called “Flowers for Sick People.” His still life paintings of flowers, painted in loud colors with markers, and spray paint, and acrylics, occupy their small space with whimsy and pride – and make their way into the hands of the unsuspecting.

Each artist incorporates the elements of the ”still life” – form, colour, texture, and composition – in their work. With their well honed craft they pay homage to everyday objects. They notice and pay attention. They interpret. And then they share.

Masking is required inside the Gallery.