When I set up a still life for my drawing class I do fuss with the drapery and the objects, but not in the way you might think. I make the fabric crinkly and energetic. As for the objects, the more absurd the association between them, 
the better. What I mean is that when the objects don’t tell a coherent story, the mind doesn’t slide into some conventional sense of “beauty” and instead really focuses on shapes and the spaces between them. This is a subversive idea, isn’t it! You spend your whole life straining to achieve coherence and non-absurdity and you’re proud of your skills in that department. Now you find yourself in a drawing class and this normal-looking instructor encouraged you to go subversive. Well, boys and girls, that’s the dirty little art secret: you have to throw that grenade. You have to add a twist; you have to invent; you have to have an idea; you have to slip us a surprise.
Here then is Karen G.’s take on this still life. To start with, of all the parts of the still life she can pick on, she chooses a bit of corner drapery (#4) and the stem—only the stem—of the amaryllis. It’s a plastic amaryllis (towards #1) with a thick coiled stem. The choice of this portion of the still life is itself already wonderfully daring. In the drawing, we won’t know what the coil represents, it will be an absurd—because disconnected and unnamable—shape. The stem ends at #2. But because we can’t see the flower, we don’t know what this is and it looks like a tube inserted in the hilly cloth. At this stage of the drawing, the 
space at #3 is empty. What to do? After two hours of drawing, Karen’s imagination has stepped out of the everyday literal perception of objects and into its proper domain: invention. She invents the coil at #3. Makes it up out of thin air. Now we have a coil entering the hilly shape in the front and exiting in the back. This creates a paradox, in that we can see clearly what’s going on (because of the quality of the drawing) and at the same time this construction does not occur in real life and flies in the face of our expectations about still lifes. The viewer is momentarily stumped and is drawn into contemplation of this paradox. A paradox, however, is not the same thing as a mess. Notice the echoing of the same shape, a diamond, at 3 and 4 and just to the right of 2. The drawing draws you into art.
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”—Oscar Wilde
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 