Martha Kelly Art

Today’s still life is tomatoes. I bought some lovely Cherokee purple ones at the market, and I had fun painting one in the sunflower painting over the weekend. Summer tomatoes are worth celebrating, so I decided they deserved their own painting. This is the lunchtime progress, so it’s not finished yet (I’m taking a long break and doing a blog post), but I had a tomato at lunch to match my painting, so I thought that might be fun to show.

The other thing was that I kept thinking about still lifes in general while I was painting. I put up a post about them yesterday, and this painting was feeling very generic to me as I started it, right up until I started painting details into the Bridgman pottery platter the tomatoes sit on.

So this still life, I very intentionally chose a platter by Melissa to use. I wanted that lightness shining out of the darkness, but I also wanted some of her distinctive work and pattern included. Craft has not always been appreciated on the level of art in this country, but it is equally beautiful and often more skillful. It began to feel like a painting that was more personally mine when I put in the handiwork of a friend. I’d like to include more pottery in my still lifes to come. My first was my new Shearwater teapot I brought back from Ocean Springs when I had work at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. Including it, aside from celebrating its beauty, was a way for me to memorialize that moment in my career. I intend to keep my still lifes personal by using items I own, things that are important to me, and things made my people who are important to me. The vase in the sunflowers is one I inherited from my Mom, and it always makes me think of her.

Back to work now (and I’ll get a better shot of this painting when I finish it), but the final photo is lunch, the one Cherokee purple in the house that is not currently posing for me. This time it’s on a plate by Perry Munn potters, the friends I visited in Arkansas last week who are also the resident potters at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View.

Kudos to Melissa Bridgman for loaning the platter out to me for this. I have a lot of her work, but nothing the shape I was envisioning.

I love Dutch still lifes, as I wrote about yesterday, but they tended to show off the wealth of their patrons by painting fine china, ornate goblets, and other fancy and expensive objects. What I want to do in my still lifes is to show the beauty of daily life. I hope people will slow down and admire the sheen of a tomato before eating it or remember to get themselves flowers at the market once in a while. And one of my daily happinesses is using handmade things in my regular life. I’m friends with lots of potters, and I love to use the plates, bowls, and teapots they have made.