Plastic Grapes

I still have one of my first-ever oil paintings - done when I must have been about twelve or thirteen....unless my memory fails me, which would not be too unusual.
It’s painted on cheap canvas board. The subject is a banal still-life, self-consciously set up on piece of thin wood panelling. This panelling also appears as the background. My stepfather Phil had built two bedrooms in the basement of our house and he finished the walls with sheets of this wood panelling.

The lamp was an oil lamp which I remember clearly. There is the stylized coaster holder from Israel. The grapes were most likely plastic. The wine glass was a needed touch of green. And, of course, no respectable still-life that includes a wine glass and grapes could exist without the chianti-basket-bottle! The dark fabric adds an element of theatricality to the whole silly procedure.

My weak memory allows for little familiarity with the making of this thing. What strikes me is the attention to detail. I do remember painting the facets of the lamp globe reflecting the flame within. Like many students of painting, I was lost in the trees unmindful of the forest. I was certainly no Caravaggio.

I’m glad to have this old still life because I have always struggled between Classicism and Expressionism, to use two common terms. The worlds that these two ideas embody roughly frame the clash between analytical observation and freely-embraced intuition. Modernism rose out of the friction inherent in this duality and I have embraced many of the tenets of the Modernist movement. Finding the balance between the two is in my DNA and forms the basis for my art. That said, I feel today nearly as clueless as I was when I carefully finished this bad painting. The largest difference now, I suppose, is that what was once laborious is now nearly effortless and what my young self thought to be reality has since exploded into the ten thousand things.