Still Life in Watercolors

The landscape of Still
seí i/s /oo& again at Still Life
with Blue Pot this time without
regard for the possible personal meanings,
biographical resonances, iconography, or
inventory of its objects. This time let us read
its formal logic, its spatial relations, its
passages from object to object. This time let
us take quite a bit longer and exercise more
patience. And this time let us journey through
it as if it were a kind of geography, a still life
that invites the viewer's imaginative entrance
into it like a landscape with a road winding
its way from front to back and soliciting
the vicarious traveler's wandering eye. Let us
understand it as a landscape that plots its
course, again, through the painter's studio
while suggesting another opening onto the
world outside, another kind of association
with the plein air motif.
Seven apples, or perhaps eight, are
arranged before, behind, and around a white
pot, found roughly in the center of the composition.
There are seven or perhaps eight
red-gold, roughly spherical objects, three of
which are placed right next to the base of the
white pot, sitting atop the white cloth with
its red stripe. Two of those three apples sit
right in front of the white pot, and one of
them is placed at its side, forming a sort of
bridge or stepping stone between white pot
and milk jug, a kind of boulder in the little
ravine that is opened up between those two
objects (detail 2). On the other side of the
white pot, the unguarded side open to the
space at the right edge of the image, at
a slightly, but only slightly, greater distance,
we find a fourth apple, this one nestled
in the multicolored tapestry, right at the
juncture between the napkin and the tapestry,
opening up a sort of valley out of which
issues a waterfall of white cloth.
Together these four simple apples serve
several not-so-simple purposes. First, they
double the volume of the white pot with their
own volumes, marking, with their own roundnesses,
the imaginary passage from side to
front to side that describes the white pot in
the round, indexing its projection with their
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