Day out: still life with the artist’s shoes

Day out: Still Life with the Artist’s shoes. The stairs are a metaphor for being an artist in a market economy. Acrylics on paper, 24 x 32 cm

£75.00

Day out: Still Life with orange, stones and the Artist’s shoes. I freely admit to posing the articles on the stairs. Doing so was in part an ironic commentary on ‘found objects’ and formal still life paintings. It was also a way of expressing my increasing anger with living in poverty and only occasionally selling a painting. The idea is that someone – the artist – has come home after an exhausting day out, taken off a coat or dropped a bag, put down the uneaten orange and the stones found at the beach and kicked off his shoes.

As a painting, I liked the challenge of the perspective, the rapidly diminishing light, the textures, the colours – and the heel of the shoe that’s almost worn through. In another age, a brace of partridge might be lying there instead of the shoes, the stairs replaced by a marble kitchen top or a polished wooden table. The stairs, ascending into the gloom are as obvious a metaphor for the arduous task of being an artist in a market-driven economy as one could ask for.

If you l;ike this you might also like this more traditional still life, or these objets trouvés.