Object unit - research

Furthering my research I began looking at the 16th century. Still life developed as a separate category in the Netherlands. Artists were commissioned to make paintings of flowers, which at the time were very expensive, and considered a mark of great wealth. These images were designed to look very real, often including insects and spiders to try and enhance the realism.
 

The reason why I researched the artist  Keith Arnatt was because his imagery of food and waste could correspond to my object idea. His series 'Pictures from a Rubbish Tip' (1988-89) is a body of work devoted to images of decomposing food, some in their plastic wrappers, some naked. Arnatt uses the medium of photography with the style of a painter.

When researching you begin to notice colour is important to him, and this comes out in one image depicting a strip of bacon and a piece of eggshell against a backdrop of plastic partially obscuring a pink floral pattern behind. But it's not how the items are depicted, that makes the image interesting, it’s how the light falls on the objects, or how the plastic makes a composition of rubbish appear as a painting, this relates back to the artist Flemish.