"You wretch! You have upset the pose! You should sit like an apple. Whoever saw an apple fidgeting?"
Cezanne's famous invective against Ambroise Vollard, who was sitting for his portrait, highlights one difference between still life and figure painting: you observe the still life anchored in repose; but the human figure is alive—the pose and expression change and are never exactly the same.
For many years, regardless of what other images I was painting, I have returned regularly and intently to the still life, nature morte, and to studies of the human figure, which can be called nature vivante. I do pastels from the model once a week and continue to find in the figure, and in the objects of still lifes, subjects my heart, hand, and eye can use as springboards. Though my most ambitious recent work has been very large (up to 8' x 12'—cityscapes of a pulsating New York City and vast Montana landscapes, all oil on canvas, work that takes weeks, months, sometimes years to complete—my studies from the model are usually made in an hour or two and my still lifes are done "alla prima," though I sometimes rework them. Both are in this sense sketches.
Wordsworth says of another genre, having felt "the weight of too much liberty," that it is sometimes "pastime to be bound/Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground." Limitations can bring a kind of freedom—though no painting, however small in scope, is pastime" to a painter, who must constantly reinvent himself with each new work.
Shown together, these recent small works in their very limitations reveal an expansion of my painterly vocabulary, which is always in flux; and the work itself seems to contrast, reflect, and even comment on its counterpart. The images are more singular than those in my cityscapes, the complexity less, but these direct forms are a constant source of renewal for me and, I think, they are both "relevant" to my more ambitious work and more intimate.
—Mari Lyons
