@michaelcostelloartist
Memoriam

Nature Morte

“Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing ones sensations.” Paul Cezanne

Still life, aka nature morte, is the tradition of painting inanimate objects that delight the eye. Still lives may be a celebration of the pleasures of life such as food and wine or a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures. The genre of memento mori from the Latin “remember you must die” often contain dead flora, corpses of fauna and the presence of pest that remind us of the passage of time and the brevity of life.

These works hover between memento mori and the Proustian Moment, a vivid recollection of past events through sensory stimulation. The objects which we might fail to notice day to day in these works conjure up the unconscious memory of a unique experience, time, or place.