Xan Peters, “Emulating the Extravagant: Applying Dutch Still Life Conventions to the Painting of Montana Birds,” BOZetto, Vol. 4, Autumn 2016, 1-3.

 

            During the Baroque era, the Dutch evolved formal intricacies and religious messages in still lifes completely unique to their culture.  From the perspective of other Europeans at the time, they seem to have chosen oddly banal subjects for paintings at a time when the rest of the continent considered only history and religious paintings to be worthwhile pursuits.  In the Netherlands, the indifference to royalty and the growth of the burgher class opened the door for artists to create conventions appropriate for a developing capitalist society.  Dutch Baroque paintings employ not only specific conventions of subject matter but also engage techniques of communication unique to the region.  This paper will describe the process of creating a new pronk (or lavish) still life—a painting that builds on Dutch themes and integrates ornithological iconography appropriate to the Montana landscape.  The discussion will also consider social and environmental tensions within Montana and its inhabitants’ search for an identity based on its resources.

 

With a de facto independence wrested from the Spanish king through drainage of the marsh lands and mastery of the sea lanes, the Dutch focused on their liberty and nationalist pride in their land.  It could be said that Americans who live in the West, including Montana, have always felt more loyalty to the land and less to any centralized authority due to the geographic isolation and available natural resources.  Just as Dutch business leaders and financiers presided over Dutch towns and cities, American enterprise was responsible for many of the settlements across Montana.  Montanans generally do not boast about their political or social influences and instead derive their pride from a history of working the land and gleaning riches from the wilderness. 

 

Dutch still life paintings abound with references to the products of Dutch business and trade.  They are filled with large amounts of food, flowers, and curiosities to lure the viewer with the potential excesses that life has to offer.  The abundance featured is often unnatural.  Flowers that bloomed at different times of the year would be placed in the same vase.  Meals that would have been impossible to obtain or consume in one sitting lay on the table about to go to waste.  There is also evidence of insect activity, decay, the passage of time, and inevitable death.  These moral warnings, essential to Dutch religious teachings, were propounded in a far more abstract way in a pronk still life than in a frankly moral narrative scene prevalent in other countries like France and Italy.  This meaning was lost on the uninitiated who perpetuated the idea that the Netherlanders were incapable of producing great art. 

 

The painting I have created (figure 1) is intended to activate thought and comments on an American way of life without direct representation of its history or leaders.  The choice of birds as a subject is meant to reference their identity as a product of nature and as signs of independence or freedom.  Those featured here are of varying sizes and habits but can be found in Montana.  Some of these birds are in fact a part of everyday life.  They are represented in an act of congregation in order to showcase their natural beauty and abundance and to discomfort the viewer with an overwhelming force.  Their interactions on the table are intentionally unnatural and inconsistent.  Some of these birds are migratory and do not coexist at the same time in the state.  Some are only found in certain areas or environments and do not interact normally.  Some other still prey on each other. Yet all have found themselves in a scene that is purely a creation of the studio.  In this way, the natural is made to collide with the unnatural.

 

 

 

The first stage of the process of making the painting was to arrange a menagerie of birds in a fashion similar to that of a pronk or vanitas still life.  Compositionally speaking, there is a sloping arrangement of objects, interjecting lines, and negative space that lead the eye through the image.  The birds pile onto the table and disperse outward, mimicking the overflow often seen in teeming paintings.  Three birds cling to the edge of the table, adding tension and emphasizing the pull of gravity in the manner an artist would place a plate of food there irresponsibly as if about to fall.  The compositional lines lead to a jar of fruit that has been left open and toppled over, now being consumed by the birds.   Two jars farther back are still full and protected but the quickly vanishing fruit leaves their future uncertain.  There is a limit to the resources in the scene just as there is to those in a land where abundant natural resources support livelihoods and economies.  What is more is that some of the birds themselves do not eat fruit at all and are recognizably carnivorous; in fact, they may in time prey on the other birds.  The ambivalence of background tone suggests the atmosphere’s tendency to change rapidly:  clouds are present alongside patches of blue sky.  Rapidly changing weather like this is a common enough sight in Montana, giving the viewer an idea of sudden volatility.

 

By utilizing ekphrasis (the ability of painting to evoke poetry or words, often through iconographical juxtaposition), the artist suggests a play between interior and exterior spaces—a micro / macrocosmic relationship where elements of both the still life and landscape are found in one another.  In keeping with the Dutch theories of creating a small survey of the world in still life, the jars of fruit represent the primary colors and act as a watershed of color for the painting as they are the primary resource for the small ecosystem that has been fabricated in the composition.  They are contained and confined yet every hue is derived from them and the food chain begins with them. 

 

The piece also contains hints and warnings of the passage of time, a very common convention in Dutch art.  Not only does one ask, “How long could a sight such as this last?” but there are visual cues suggesting the brevity of this moment in relation to the next.  The quick, cautious looks one expects from the alert birds is evident.  A hummingbird has flown into view and has been frozen in its blur of constant motion.  A bird skull rests at the taloned feet of the prairie falcon to serve as a Memento Mori (warning of mortality).  Two particular birds, the collared pigeon and pheasant, are not native to the North American continent and therefore question what is considered a natural habitat.  The unnaturally arranged chaos seeks an organic resolution as the mind imagines how the world in this painting will conclude.

 

Montana is a state whose land mass is still largely agrarian and/or undeveloped.  With the passage of time though, for better or for worse, noticeable changes in way of life, society and culture are foreseeable.  As evidenced in the many abandoned ghost towns across the state and much of the American West, the abrupt depletion or disruption of natural resources can destroy a city.  In those areas that continue to thrive, one can see one force replaced by another in reaping opportunities in the landscape, from European settlers driving out Native Americans to hotels and resorts raising the cost of living for local residents and thereby attracting the rich and driving out the poor.

 

This project has allowed me to create something more than a study:  it has allowed me to make a piece more engaging, to air personal insights and without the burden of traditional historical or religious iconography.  An artist can find new communicative skills by referencing what a person from a specific time and place experiences in his daily life and then build contemporary abstract concepts out of it.  Using a genre familiar to the Dutch, I have employed my own “ornithological  iconography” to communicate Montana values all the while keeping in mind that it all  has been artificially constructed, admitting the potential for it all to change forever.