The Self-Isolation Residency 6th April 2020: Day 8

 'Lemon tea', acrylic on paper, 2019, Antony Clarkson.

I'm finding this an interesting project, it is of course a self-portrait but it is also a still life. Still life painting as a genre basically evolved from portrait painting, the selection and placement of the objects around the sitter formed the basis of the idea. It could be argued that early still life paintings were painted for practice between the artists portrait commissions.

Its not everyone's cup of tea, but personally I enjoy painting still lifes, they actually are great ways to practice both your drawing and painting skills. I frequently run painting classes both for individual students and large group where I will encourage the students to work from still life. Students will often try to work from photographs rather than from life; it can be hard in a studio to find something to painting if you do not have a model to pose for you, but a good still life set up can both challenge an artist and produce interesting work. Of course a good still life arrangement will try to tell a story, albeit a simple one. The image at the top of this post, 'Lemon tea' is a good example of this. I actually painted this as a demonstration  piece for an acrylics course that I taught about a year ago, the his objects in this painting were selected both for there narrative value and for their colour relationships.

Anyway, as usual I digress. Whist I was working on the landscape studies that I posted over the weekend I was considering how I would move my self portrait project forward. When I started thinking about this project in terms of a self portrait/still life it set up certain objects that I felt reflected my character, my likes and interests in my favorite chair. To some extent the problem with this arrangement was that the objects were all in the chair. the arrangement felt too contrived, too staged. Why would these things be in the chair like that?  But I still wanted to include the chair, its something that's quite personal to me. As I thought about it over the weekend I realised that there was a simple and quite elegant solution to this problem, chairs have an anthropomorphic nature, their arms their legs, their posture. If I am sat in the chair my body takes on the form of the chair, therefore I do not need to be in the chair, the chair, like all the other objects, comes to represent me.