September 29, 2002

I have really been struggling the last few days to capture in words some sense of my ambitions with my current painting. By the way, the working title for this painting is "Still Life with Ceramic Kitty. I keep finding myself back to Cézanne. His work is essential to the direction this painting has gone-in spirit, balance, color harmonies, and, to a certain extent, in subject matter. I've essentially set the same "problem" for myself-how to paint a still life and still project an air of monumentality. However, I have example of how other artists following Cézanne presented alternate, more exaggerated solutions to Cézanne's "problem"-particularly the cubists.

My inspiration reaches back much further than that though. The underlying structure of the composition starts with a nearly equilateral triangle slightly left of center. The objects of the still life, a ceramic white kitty with a bright red, fuzzy ball between her paws, a gourd and a beer mug shaped shot glass with a clothespin standing in it, are arranged within this triangle in a way that recalls Raphael's Madonna and Child paintings, In particular I was thinking back on the "Madonna of the Meadows", though I doubt I was true to the position of the figures. The kitty takes the place of the Madonna, her ball baby Jesus, and the shot glass and clothespin St. John with his staff. The gourd merely emphasizes the horizontals, as they are prominent in the background of the "Madonna of the Meadows".