![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/02-1.jpeg\")
<\/a>The meticulous arrangement and stylish rendering of mundane objects is one of the first recognizable genres of painting. We gaze with incomprehension on the images of Stone Age cavemen and Egyptians, but what little survives from the first work by people like us\u2014no Classical Greek paintings survive, but from Rome we have the murals of Pompeii\u2014confirms the primacy and durability of still life. Romans liked to see themselves on their walls, alongsidetrompe l\u2019oeil\u00a0<\/em>depictions of what they owned. Two millennia later we almost never paint Renaissance pageants or Baroque history, but arrangements of flowers, things to eat, and portable furnishings are very much still with us. One place to see remarkable still lifes until March 19th is at the St. George Art Museum, which is showing a large assortment of Charles Becker\u2019s paintings. Becker is a popular artist whose works sell quickly, so only the generosity of the owners permits assembling such a satisfying occasional overview of his work.<\/p>\nViewers used to thinking that still life is a miniature genre will be surprised to enter the gallery and encounter \u201cPlease Step In,\u201d which is six feet tall and five wide. Anyone who has been frustrated by the near-invisibility of Van Eyck\u2019s tiny self-portrait, easily overlooked in the distorting mirror on the back wall of \u201cThe Wedding of Arnolfini,\u201d will appreciate the compound reflections of the artist\u2019s studio in the silver pitcher that is the principal subject of \u201cPlease Step In.\u201d They include two contrasting images of the artist that are at least 8\u201d tall. In \u201cOn the Mark\u201d the same pitcher appears tiny compared to the looming china platter with a bulls-eye pattern that frames it and gives the painting its name. There are no accidents in still life, and the way subjects are used or composed makes a point, whether it\u2019s immediately apparent or not.<\/p>\n
Becker\u2019s genre\u2014\u201cSuper Real\u201d\u2014is distinct from\u00a0Surreal<\/em>, or \u201cbeyond real.\u201d Salvador Dal\u00ed, perhaps the best-known Surrealist, claimed also to have invented the kind of hallucinatory realism that Becker displays, and from time to time Becker appears to acknowledge the connection. For instance, in another large panel a mysteriously tiny woman holding a basin pours a stream of water that turns into a ribbon that leads to a table full of classic still life elements. Only the title, \u201cEnchanted Waterhouse,\u201d reveals that the source is not Dali, but John William Waterhouse, a late Pre-Raphaelite whose women are among that movement\u2019s most popular representations today. A similarly surreal-seeming passage occurs in \u201cA Beautiful Mind\u201d (from the \u201cScissors Series\u201d), where a brush is suspended midway through painting a cherry, half the paint perfectly embodying the fruit while the other half drips across an otherwise invisible surface on which otherwise empty space is already signified. But where Dal\u00ed is said to concern auto-erotic dreams, Becker only reminds us that an artist has magic up his sleeve. Similarly \u201cPulp, Drip, Squeeze,\u201d wherein a gilt silver chalice becomes a ribbon that spirals freely, pours itself into the form of a strawberry, and finally melts. The topic here isn\u2019t reality, but the power of paint and our minds to transcend reality.<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t always the point, as I was reminded before we headed over to the St. George Art Museum. By coincidence, our condo was decorated with reproductions of Paul C\u00e9zanne\u2019s landscapes, and we know C\u00e9zanne wanted these familiar profiles of Mt. St-Victoire and the aqueduct to do the same thing he made still life do: a purpose very different from Charles Becker\u2019s. C\u00e9zanne, along with Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat, attempted a course-correction on the brief trajectory of the Impressionists that we know as Post-Impressionism. Their goal, seen to advantage in the fruit C\u00e9zanne rendered like a string of letter c\u2019s\u2014was to rediscover the structure of the physical world that had all but dissolved in the swirling optical phenomenology of Monet.<\/p>\n A good way to see the difference would be to stand before one of Becker\u2019s canvases, with it\u2019s infinitesimal lace, chipped crockery, and translucent grapes, each containing a vivid lesson about surface appearances, while holding a copy of Vincent Van Gogh\u2019s \u201cStill Life With Drawing Board, Pipe, Onions and Sealing Wax\u201d of 1889. The Dutchman\u2019s surfaces are just as painstakingly rendered, but the intention could hardly be more different. The same parallel lines that limn his onions\u2019 green shoots also mark their skins. Every object acknowledges the yellow table that supports it. Paradoxically, in spite of the greater visual impact of Becker\u2019s objects, it is Van Gogh\u2019s that feel present. Becker\u2019s technique is like Calculus, reducing the distance between the original and the copy to zero. In the process, visual information prevails. Van Gogh\u2019s objects confess their oily substance, but even as we see they are painted, we\u00a0perceive<\/em>\u00a0their underlying reality. Becker\u2019s glass of wine looks good enough to drink, but you cannot and never could. It\u2019s not in this world. There can be no doubt that Van Gogh ate his onions, after palming their skins, inhaling their perfume, and slicing into their pungent interiors.<\/p>\n The presence of such different approaches to painting similar subjects gives us a chance not only to compare techniques, but to ask how the purpose of still life has evolved. It\u2019s a paradox that where artists used these intimate scenes for centuries to reflect on the impermanence of material things, thereby incorporating a pedagogical moral message, the genre calls attention to the maker\u2019s skill in a way that encourages pride. At times it was common to openly challenge audiences to distinguish painting from original. By the 19th century still life was an affordable decoration, an altar-like personal space for the owner\u2019s self indulgence no longer in the forefront of artistic growth. But for C\u00e9zanne, table top topography offered a laboratory for demonstrating his basic visual structures: sphere, cone, cylinder, cube. Van Gogh added a repertoire of marks that can build those forms: dots, dashes, lines. If C\u00e9zanne\u2019s theory parallels the then-recent discovery that atoms are made of protons and electrons, then Van Gogh played the role of later scientists who showed that these can be broken down further, into quarks.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>\n\t\t\t
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>\n\t\t\t
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>
\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<\/a>A third approach to still life comes from Salt Lake artist Brad Overton. His most recent show at the Phillips Gallery closed in February, but the gallery still has some of the paintings, as well as photos archived at their website. His works initially appear closer to Post-Impressionism than to Becker\u2019s extreme realism, but his goal lies somewhere between the two. If Becker\u2019s brush could be said to disappear into the surfaces he renders, and Van Gogh\u2019s surfaces to dematerialize under the onslaught of his brush, Overton may be said to capture the precise moment when a confectionary slurry of paint gels into a recognizable image. In \u201cSanta Fe Breakfast\u201d a teacup oscillates nervously between its prescription as an architectonic cylinder and the flat-looking smears of blue and white that decorate it. No matter how close a viewer comes to a Becker, its illusions hang together. But what Overton makes look solid across the room becomes an almost sculptural pattern of brushstrokes at normal viewing range.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>\n\t\t\t
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>