Unit 3 Reflections - The atmospheric still lives, Talisman & Aide memoire.

Breakfast with Cezanne. Oil On Canvas 20 X 20 cm. Sarah Chalkie Cloonan. 2021.

My paintings work in many different ways. The atmospheric still lives, Talisman & Aide

memoirs.

In 1980 something, while working on of a series of still lives for a show that was already booked, I started a still life … a collection painting…just a group of objects that I had arranged on top of a chest of draws, not my chest of draws it belonged to the person who I was living with at the time. The objects were gifts and things I had found. The gifts were given with love and the other objects somehow gave them somewhere to be.

I chose a large stretcher frame and pulled a cotton heavy weight canvas taught around it before applying two layers of rabbit skin glue and a thin layer of gesso. The dog looked hopeful - Id made the mistake of leaving a canvas in his reach before and he had licked it bare.

I quickly sketched locating the objects and mapped their relationships to one another in my half lit room, like memories gathered. Using raw umber and ocher oil paint to sketch, I applied the black to show the bits behind them, their past that followed them, making them what they were, their identities, this is what I would explore in the coming weeks of oil paint on canvas.

The doorbell rang, the dog barked, something happened.

Whatever it was that distracted me from my musings is long gone, lost in time.

I hung the painting in a frame on the wall to sit and ‘cook’ until my next session. It sat behind its subject. Art Imitating life. It never made it to the show I didn't want to disturb the arrangement and my agent didn't show much interest, there was plenty of work to construct the show from and I let her choose what fitted her narrative.

Months later the dog finally made it up on to the chest of draws and ate the head off the wooden duck my mother had given me, it had never looked so triumphant, and in the process broke the spell. I didn't mind I had the painting somehow what had been important was contained within the picture within the single plane and frame.

Someone stopped one evening to stare and I found them still staring a good ten minutes later and they said how much, will you sell it and I did. It had found its owner.

I can still just see it in my minds eye. I let it go but I have the memory, I saw, I thought, I did I understood.