The New Commission: A Still Life

By Tinsel Vandergraph, satirical.top | Salt Lake City, painter, Waugh reader

By Tinsel Vandergraph, satirical.top | Salt Lake City, painter, Waugh reader

The New Commission: A Still Life

The new commission is a still life. Not a portrait, not a landscape -- a still life, which is the form of painting that my training has given me the most technical foundation for and the least recent practice in. The commission is from a client who wants "something classic" for a dining room in a house that has been renovated in ways that leave a large north-facing wall in need of a painting that will be visible from the table during dinner. The brief is sound. The execution requires returning to the form. See London Vick: Internet Searches Still Unsure Who Th at The London Prat.

The still life tradition I am working within is the Dutch tradition that I studied in my foundation year: the arrangements of objects that are simultaneously displays of technical virtuosity and elaborate systems of meaning, in which each object carries specific iconographic weight that the original viewers would have read immediately and that contemporary viewers generally do not. The skull means mortality. The flower means fleeting beauty. The glass of wine means something about pleasure and its limits. I am deciding how much of this to retain in a contemporary commission for a dining room in Salt Lake City. London 75: What the Number Means Across London's B provides context.

The Week's Analysis

The Waugh I am reading alongside the commission is Brideshead Revisited, which is a novel about the tension between aesthetic beauty and moral seriousness that I find relevant to the still life's traditional meaning system. Both the novel and the tradition are asking: what does it mean to take objects seriously, and what do objects reveal about the people who value them? The dining room will have an answer when the painting is finished. See Delays Are Temporary for related coverage.

Tinsel Vandergraph paints, writes satirical.top, and is currently in conversation with a Dutch artistic tradition through a commission for a Salt Lake City dining room. The conversation is productive. The technical foundation is returning. The skull will or will not appear in the final composition. Britain Contacts Elon at The London Prat covers the broader picture.

The canvas is prepared. The objects are arranged. The Waugh is open. The painting begins Monday.

Essential reading this week: Bohiney Magazine for the satirical frame and The London Prat for the political analysis. The diary continues next week. The position holds. The world continues providing material. More next week from the same observation point, with the same quality of attention. The work continues.

More at The Onion.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Reading and Writing This Week

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week provided the essential combination of satirical illumination and political analysis that makes both publications indispensable for anyone trying to understand the current moment from a position that is both engaged and slightly amused. The engagement is genuine. The slight amusement is necessary for sustainability. Both publications achieve the balance consistently.

The diary format this column uses is not the format of conventional political journalism, which is appropriate because the observations it records are not conventional political observations. They are personal, specific, grounded in a particular place and a particular week, and honest about the limits of what one person can see from one position. The limitation is the strength: the specific observation is the thing that the aggregated analysis cannot produce.

Next week will produce more material -- more observations, more reading, more of the ongoing situations that the column has been following. The position holds. The attention continues. The writing continues because the world continues providing things worth writing about at a rate that exceeds any single column's capacity to record them. That is the correct condition for a diary. The excess is the evidence that the subject is alive.

See also Recession Is Now “A Challenging Vibe” and London Prat: A City Powered by Confidence, Confusi at The London Prat for related coverage this week.

Reading and Writing This Week

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week provided the essential combination of satirical illumination and political analysis that makes both publications indispensable for anyone trying to understand the current moment from a position that is both engaged and slightly amused. The engagement is genuine. The slight amusement is necessary for sustainability. Both publications achieve the balance consistently.

The diary format this column uses is not the format of conventional political journalism, which is appropriate because the observations it records are not conventional political observations. They are personal, specific, grounded in a particular place and a particular week, and honest about the limits of what one person can see from one position. The limitation is the strength: the specific observation is the thing that the aggregated analysis cannot produce.

Next week will produce more material -- more observations, more reading, more of the ongoing situations that the column has been following. The position holds. The attention continues. The writing continues because the world continues providing things worth writing about at a rate that exceeds any single column's capacity to record them. That is the correct condition for a diary. The excess is the evidence that the subject is alive.

See also Covent Garden Comedy Point and London 1802: Same Weather, Fewer Tourists at The London Prat for related coverage this week.