table d'hôte

a week ago i saw this table, leaning to the wall of my friend Jeannette's house. it was a memorable moment. sometimes you just don't know what it is you are desperately looking for until you find it.....

Jeannette was going to throw it away, but when i so obviously wanted it, she took it under her arm and carried it over to our place, where i left it on the front porch for a night, not at all concerned that anybody would want to steal it lol!

next day i unfolded my treasure and sprayed it clean with the garden hose and left it to dry (still in the middle of a heat wave....) the day after i carried it upstairs to my studio, carefully placed it against my brand new wall (with light coming in all day from both sides of the house) and went to work.

for two years i have been bringing back all kinds of trash i found on my daily rounds with the dogs. bottles, tins, plastic bags, empty food wrappers, socks, gloves, etc etc. stuff that caught my eye and somehow felt interesting. i have made a series of photographs of the objects i found, calling them 'accidental still life' and have published 100 of them on flick'r. just take a look and try to imagine all that trash being stored in crates all over our house..... (C wouldn't let me bring back any dead animals though....)

i have been wanting to create my own still life scenes using the trash, inspired by old 17th and 18th century breakfast paintings by Claesz, the bodegones of Zurbaran and Cotán, and by the murals called 'xenias' found in Pompeii. (while looking for a link to explain the whole 'xenia' concept i found this inspiring essay by anthony howell, the bit about xenias is somewhere in the middle of the text) 

anyway, here are my two first attempts at still life iphoneography

i like them very much, they come really close to what i have been imagining while picking up all that trash over the past years. can't wait to create more of these.

have decided not to paint my wall, because the unfinished 'raw' state it is in now makes it a perfect backdrop for my table d'hôte.....

so how have you been doing after the visit of your art historian neighbour? were you able to process her appraisal and encouragement? really let it sink in? or did it terrify you to be associated with the likes of Rothko..... 

looked up George Morrison, didn't know him but like his work a lot, thanks for sharing! fascinating to see the way he broadened his vision over time, developed his own unique style while at the same time channeling and incorporating the art of his predecessors and contemporaries.... 

his wood collages remind me of Kurt Schwitters, especially his Merz-bilder, have always been drawn to those and have seen and inspected a lot of them up close, funny because i now realise that Schwitters is the one that had me started collecting trash.....

want to start a new 'tradition' on this blog: sharing some inspiration

so here's what i am reading at the moment (actually, listening to, i have an audible subscription)

Eye of the Beholder, Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing, by Laura J. Snyder

inspired by this book i have bought a portable digital microscope that enables me to take photos of 'the invisible world' or what someone once called 'the theatre of nature'. will share some of the pics as soon as my sd card is full...

and here's what i'm listening to:

Currency of Man (artist's cut) by Melody Gardot. we have bought tickets for her show in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw on november 4th....