Pointillism, Process, and ‘Pantry Paintings’

Questions for Graham Anderson

This one painting made me look at Dutch still life really for the first time. At the start of my orange painting project I had mostly been thinking of the work of Juan Sánchez Cotán who was a Spanish monk painting in the early 1600s. A lot of his paintings are what are called “bodegones” which translates to “pantry paintings” as I understand it. He very meticulously rendered fruits and vegetables placed on stone ledges in storage cellars in very simple severe arrangements. They have a lot of precision and severity while also a dark mystery to them due to the deep empty blackness of the cellar backdrop. The English art historian and theorist Norman Bryson wrote beautifully of these pieces in his book “Looking At the Overlooked” which is how I first encountered them.

It’s interesting that Cotán’s works are referred to as “pantry paintings.” The reference is clearly to the fruits and vegetables of the pantry that he’s painting, but could also refer to the architecture of the pantry itself.  You incorporate compositional devices similar to cabinetry and framing directly into your work.  Can you speak to that a bit?

Yes, I think you’re right about the word “pantry” having a multivalent meaning here. I really love the strange space in Cotán’s paintings. The images are incredibly still and silent. The architecture of the space is the most prosaic kind of compositional structure, and becomes a stage. The starkness also creates a drama that ostensibly should not be there, or even be possible. Profound energies are implied and strange forces are at play. Cotán was a monk when he made these paintings and they are a depiction of the spiritual enormity revealed through, or present in, a quiet unadorned physicality that he was experiencing. I love the trickery of his almost trompe l’oeil space. It feels like painting that gets to have its cake and eat it too. It gives you a very delicious illusion while making sure you know it’s an illusion. But the image feels all the more real by making sure you know it’s not real. It’s enjoyably indulgent to give yourself over to an illusion while knowing it’s an illusion. I think my use of framing devices is mainly in that spirit. There are critical aspects to this strategy as well, like the way that a frame can refer to the space in which the artwork resides and point to its commodity nature. But the tumbling of avowal and disavowal of the illusion is more what I like.

You seem to work through compositions in multiple stages, making marker drawings on paper, cutouts of shapes, small scale gouache paintings and then larger oil and acrylic paintings on canvas. How does an idea move from one material format to another?

GA: I often start the process of a painting with a marker sketch. I love markers for many reasons. The color goes down immediately so I can start to see an image realized quickly before the idea dissipates. The colors are pre determined/ready-made which helps me to get away from just going with my own taste. Also the colors are complex and strange and I like trying to emulate their quality later on when I finally begin painting on canvas.

I like seeing the way an idea takes on different feelings in different materials. The marker drawings are translucent and casual and always have a very different attitude to them even if they get replicated with a lot of fidelity later on in oil and acrylic in the final painting.

The gouache paintings are another thing entirely. They have a solidity and resolution that the marker drawings never have, but are also much faster and less physically demanding than the paintings on canvas so I can try out ideas with them more easily. The quality of the paint has a multivalence that really appeals to me. I use it on watercolor paper so it absorbs into the paper and doesn’t retain an independent body, yet its opacity and matte sheen give it a nice firm presence.