The still life — a broader concept: At William Baczek Fine Arts, the modernization of an age-old genre
"Dahlia" by Larry Preston
It’s a time-honored style: the still-life painting. And as William Baczek sees it, a challenge for many artists who work in the field is bringing something fresh and relevant to the canvas — perhaps by expanding the traditional definition of the still life.
In his downtown Northampton gallery, Baczek has been tackling that question for 20 years with a special exhibition, and 2015 is no exception. The gallery recently opened its newest show, featuring the work of eight painters, including some from the area, all of whom take a unique approach to still life painting.
From subject matter to technique, artists like Northampton’s Scott Prior, Plainfield’s Larry Preston, and Yin Yong Chun of New York City blend traditional influences with modern sensibilities to create what Baczek calls “a mix of old and new.”
“You don’t want to do something different just for the sake of being different,” Baczek said during a recent tour of his exhibit. “But what we try to do here is look at ways of broadening the concept of a still life.” He notes that traditional still lifes — portraits of inanimate objects such as food, flowers, vases, cups and other items — date back hundreds of years, even to the times of ancient Greece and Rome.
Of the eight painters whose work is featured in the exhibit, seven have previously shown their work at Baczek Fine Arts, most of them multiple times. The eighth artist in the current show, Teresa Fischer of Belchertown, has not exhibited there before, but Baczek said he was particularly struck by how Fischer’s work offers a fresh take on traditional still lifes.
“Her paintings all have a story to tell — there’s a narrative,” Baczek said. “It’s not your typical setting of a bowl of fruit or a bouquet of flowers. At the same time, she uses this very dark background that’s reminiscent of old Dutch masters. ...It’s a unique approach.”
Fischer likes to browse for objects in antique stores and flea markets and turn them into subjects for her oil paintings, which offer a sense of fun and visions of childhood. In “Oz,” for example, three of the books from Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” series are stacked on a shelf and topped by a small statue of four small monkeys on a pedestal. Above all this floats a miniature hot-air balloon with a tiny wicker basket serving for a gondola.
Another work, “Anchored,” shows the upper part of a skull (possibly plastic, because the top is partly open) to which Fischer has attached a plastic sailboat.
Prior, the Northampton realist painter, offers two of his trademark still lifes, including “Bottles in Kitchen Window,” a hodgepodge of bottles on a kitchen window ledge; some of them are spotted with dust or stains and framed by early-morning light that can be seen in the upper right corner of the painting. A few apples and tomatoes — and a tin of tea — are scattered on a counter below the window.
“Aside from the way he depicts light, which is just terrific, what stands out in so many of Scott’s paintings is the way he invites you to take a look at ordinary objects, the kind you might otherwise ignore,” Baczek said.
For Prior, trying to be fresh or relevant isn’t really a concern. What’s compelling about art, he says, is how someone captures a particular scene or tableau, regardless of trend or style.
“I accept that many people would consider my paintings anachronistic,” he wrote in an email to the Gazette. “Usually, when I respond to a work of art it’s for its timeless qualities. I am struck by the idea that ‘nothing is new under the sun,’ that what an artist saw a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago is not that different from what I see today.”
A second look
Larry Preston, a Plainfield artist, says he doesn’t consciously think about doing still lifes in a different way, either.
“I just find things around me, ordinary things, that I really like and that I think deserve a second look,” he said in a recent phone call from his home. “I want to paint them in way that makes them beautiful, so that you’d want to put them on a pedestal.”
To do that, Preston applies numerous layers of oil glazes over his initial sketches, which gives the work a feeling of depth as well as considerable luminosity. And in paintings like “Dahlia” and “Daffodils,” two of his paintings on display at the gallery, Preston builds dark, subtly shaded backdrops that clearly evoke the work of 17th-century Dutch painters.
Yet Preston’s paintings also exude “a modern and contemporary sensibility,” as Baczek puts it, in part from the detail he brings to the object in question, which can have an almost photographic quality. “That’s something that does happen,” Preston added. “But again, I’m not doing it consciously.”
Baczek notes that background and training can have a lot of bearing on how artists approach sill lifes. Another painter in his show, Eric Wert of Oregon, once worked as a scientific illustrator at The Field Museum in Chicago, and he brings a sort of hyper-detail to his paintings that, combined with a color scheme that can border on the lurid, gives his work just a slightly off-kilter look.
“Eric’s paintings tend to be right on the edge,” said Baczek, who notes the artist has described his style as “David Lynch meets Martha Stewart.”
“Bouquet,” for instance, almost glows with vivid shades of pink, blue, red and purple flowers. But a closer look shows bugs crawling over several leaves and other insects, like a fat beetle, scattered through the painting.
Then there’s Yin Yong Chun, a Chinese-born painter now living in New York, who trained in Western-style painting. The latter techniques can be seen in his elegant depictions of bowls of fruit such as plums and apples. But the artist recalls his roots with various Asian compositional elements, such as creating backdrops based on ancient Chinese art.
“A Plate of Apples,” as one example, shows a water buffalo or ox and its calf in a pastoral setting that looks more like a watercolor than an oil painting. “His work also offers a narrative of sorts, in this case between East and West,” Baczek said.
Another local artist, Amherst College art professor Robert Sweeney, and Philadelphia painter Stanley Bielen, offer much more abstract work in the current exhibition. Sweeney’s is somewhat impressionistic; he uses thick brushstrokes to create his images of strawberries, peppers, pastries and other edibles, such that the work appears precise when seen from a distance — but altogether different if viewed up close.
Bielen, meanwhile, uses an old technique known as “grisaille,” a means of layering that lends depth to his abstract paintings of flowers in vases and glasses. Baczek notes that Bielen, unlike the other artists in the show, paints his still lifes “as is,” rather than using a photograph or sketch of the original subject.
Boston-area artist David Harrison, by contrast, takes a precise approach to his paintings, centering his subjects — a plate of pears, a collection of cups and bowls, a single roll on a paper plate — in the center of his canvases. The dark backdrop to his works, which can fill in the spaces between the objects themselves, is a central part of his paintings, Bazcek says.
“It’s really about geometry,” he said. “It’s all about positive and negative space and in capturing a sense of calmness and simplicity.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at [email protected].
“The 2015 Still Life Exhibition” at Baczek Fine Arts, 36 Main St. in Northampton, is on view through March 14. Gallery hours are Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.wbfinearts.com.
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