Still Life With A Skull And A Writing Quill Analysis

To attract and keep the attention of the audience in a genre as stale and traditional as still life painting can be a difficult task, but many painters have risen to the challenge in the hundreds of years since its invention. These methods are numerous and involve the exploration of tensions such as those that exist between abstraction and representation, or moralizing versus hedonistic. Considered one of the lowest types of art by the French Academy, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, Shoes, and Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill are three still paintings that have managed to rise above the typical wave that have been produced by artists of varying skills for centuries. Though looking at each alone does not truly illuminate the reasoning …show more content…
For instance, Claesz, in trying to push his moral rather than the pure sentiment of art for art’s sake, sticks to local color and a realistic depiction of all the elements in his Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill. Like using simple words to tell various aesops, this plain decision does not distract from the story of futility Claesz tells in his painting, and can appeal to the widest range of people purely by faithfully presenting real objects they can identify. He is not, however, completely ignorant to the power which color can wield, as the highlighted area of the skull has a powerful contrast with the dark background, again serving to make Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill yet more high-impact, so it can more efficiently deliver its message. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to discern whether Pablo Picasso used local color in Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, as his integration of the subject with the background is so absolute as to be unable to tell which plane is which part of the image. His overall color scheme is extremely muted, working only in browns and tones of black, white, and gray. This creates no impact at all at first glance, being only the most drab palette, but the genius of Picasso’s usage of color in this painting is the layering, which, contrary to all the other aspects of the painting thus far, encourage close looking. The movement needed to fully understand Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, from far-off in order to appreciate its subject, to close by in order to appreciate its technical mastery, could be a statement on the full mobility of the cerebral thinking Picasso wished to