Self-Portrait as a Lemon — Dead Nature, Still Life
After my first maternity leave, I started sketching daily ballpoint pen portraits of the baby to relearn how to see and represent. This time around, towards the end of my last maternity leave, I turned my attention to objects — a Bialetti, an apple, a whisky bottle, a lemon.
The French call still life nature morte, dead nature, which tells a different truth than the English name. In 1667, André Félibien ranked it the lowest of all painting genres. But Morandi spent a lifetime painting the same dusty bottles in Bologna, and Kentridge made a whole series called Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot. Both understood that attention is a form of love, and that it can be directed at things as well as persons.
In this essay, I share four new drawings and explore why every still life is, in the end, a self-portrait.
