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Donald Clark
A few years ago, I lived and worked for an extended period in the old city of Leiden in Holland. While there I often visited the national collections of C17th Masters, as I wanted to study at first hand their various approaches to technique, light and subject matter. Since returning to Scotland, these experiences of image and place have continued to resonate in my work. The play of intense light over objects in a still life is something that I find endlessly fascinating. It seems to bring a heightened sense of reality to the most humble subject matter, and leads the gaze of the viewer into active concentration. In my work, I use these effects of strong illumination, as well as simplified compositional elements, in order to convey a feeling of balance and stillness. Unlike other forms of representation such as landscape or portraiture, the still life usually depicts inanimate objects, with few references to the immediate passage of time. I find this aspect of the genre intriguing since, paradoxically, the objects themselves often carry associations of past or future time. In the case of seashells, they were once living creatures. With fruit and other foodstuffs, they were grown in the recent past, and will inevitably decay. The C17th Dutch “Vanitas” painters employed this latent symbolism to emphasise religious allusions to the transience of life. Even in a secular age, I feel that these subliminal associations remain inextricably linked with our response to the genre itself.
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