Momento Mori and the art of painting an apple

I always found still life painting to be one of the least interesting genres in art history. That said, I loved how painting an apple could be turned macabre.

When Paul Cézanne was painting his studies of fruit, he was exploring formal composition and the geometrical construction of shapes and planes. To me, it always seemed like he was more interested in the form of paint than the content the form took. But Cézanne obviously acknowledged the traditions that pre-dated him, like Momento Mori.

Momento Mori is a latin phrase that essentially translates to "Remember, you're going to die". As an artistic genre it covered any work that focused on mortality.

It sometimes was very subtle...

And sometimes quite obvious.

As I muse on the history and traditions that come before me, I try to find the context for my work. And as mundane as still lifes will ever be, I wonder if I'll ever overcome my fetishistic focus on the paint of paintings.

For now remember, these are paintings. Momento Pictori.

If my nose could talk, and other deep thoughts

Here is a short story about, well, my nose! So buckle down for some serious reading.

I basically wanted to see if how far I could expand on the silliest of premises. Hope y'all enjoy!

Well, my apologies if the format was a bit confusing. I wrote this all on one sheet of paper, with no edits so this was the best I could do.

A birthday of thoughts

Here's some randomness from the weekend.

Thank you, brain.


I love the idea of the charming insult. Saying something hurtful from a loving place. I wonder if that's really possible?



I was thinking about the evolution of video game inspiration and this is what I came up with. Pac man gave way to Mario. And Mario gave way to Meat boy.
"Seeing through the veil" is written below. Above I wrote "love is here. here is now"


And this last picture is pretty self explanatory I think.

Free verse sketches

Courage Wolf

crash (coloured)

A leaving home

Crash

November 12th was one of the scariest days of my life.

I will meditate on this moment so I can always remember how lucky I really am to be alive.

BRAINS!

thinking of home

a house is not a home

The original idea was to have the owl staring at his home (which was going to be a tree suspended on the right side of the picture) but instead I decided to make the allegory a little more subtle by playing with his shadow.

Pretty happy with how it turned out.

_____, sweet _____.

form and colour

primary fun

done/undone

For the last month I've been working on something a bit different. I started with the basic idea of building up surface depth through adding layers of colour on top of one another. 4 panels and 132 layers later, the surfaces gained over 1cm of thickness. Pretty cool.

In a minimalistic kind of way, I think the materials really shine. I also like how the process remains visible. But I'm interested, how does everyone else feel?


Panel 1, close up
Panel 3, close up