6X6 INS. PAINTINGS ABOVE - WHERE THE INSPIRATION CAME FROM
Two things came together to create this series of Still-Lifes; the first being the inspiration that hit me whilst on a recent visit to New York and the second is the fact that in the 80’s my wife Fanny set up her own cookery school in Hong Kong teaching bread and yeast cookery from around the world. She taught everything from challah and bagels to croissants and baguettes! For me, inspiration is as essential an ingredient to my painting as flour is to bread-making; without yeast the bread won’t rise, and so it is with my painting - without inspiration the works will not rise beyond being “good” and I want to achieve much more than that. During the late 70’s, through the 80’s and into the early 90’s, Still-Life was my main source of inspiration. I painted hundreds of them in Paris, New York and then Bali. Every morning during those years I would wake up and see something that would so excite me, from a cabbage to a bowl or basket of exotic fruit, that I simply had to translate that excitement into paint. I think I painted so many Still-Lifes during those years that I wore out the source of inspiration. Or perhaps I even felt I had painted every kind of fruit and vegetable to the point where I couldn’t be excited by them any more. And so I stopped painting Still-Lifes, except as small details in much larger compositions, and switched to painting the Nude, which has been the main subject of my work for the last ten years or so. Happily for me my Still-Lifes were very popular; I sold them all, managing to keep only a few out of perhaps a thousand . I continued to receive requests to paint more, but I simply couldn’t make bread without flour. However, during a recent visit to New York at the end of 2006, I was staying with a very close friend who insisted on taking me to one great Art Exhibition after another, from the Met to the Guggenheim and from the Dahesh to the Morgan. To my greatest amazement, by the end of my trip I had seen so many Still-Lifes that I was positively aching to paint some new ones of my own! When I returned home I asked Fanny to make me “three unusual bread rolls,” to start the ball rolling. One of my favourite series I had ever painted was of bread and cheese and I started with some new versions of that subject. Of course, the rolls led to croissants which in turn led to baguettes and so on. The inspiration was, and still is, flowing and each subject seems to tell me what the next one should be. One of the most significant developments in my Art during my “non-Still-Life” years was that I had moved from being a classical painter to being a Surrealist. This opened endless new possibilities to me in my new series. Combined with my continued love affair with New York, it produced the “Nanny in New York“ and “Taking the Baby for a Stroll in New York” for example. In the 80’s,during a trip to India, I discovered that creating Art was considered there as an act of worship, thanking the gods for the beauty of whatever was about to be translated into paint. I liked the concept so much that I painted my own “Worship Series,” mostly of fruit, but with an occasional vegetable squeezed in and even an egg or two. The idea of the small (6” X 6”) format forced me to concentrate absolutely all my energy into a tiny area, challenging me to approach perfection. Artistically I found it interesting to see to what degree I could transcend the limitations of the smallness of this area and create images that gave an impression of being far larger than they actually were. I always considered “Dancing Bananas” the most successful of these experiments. “The Worship Series” proved to be one of the most popular of all, and was certainly the one that I enjoyed creating the most. And so, with this new series I have decided to stick to that same format and only paint on 6” x 6” panels. Starting with Fanny’s three little bread rolls, the number of subjects that have presented themselves is amazing and I don’t feel I have finished yet … Anthony Christian (Image: A Bunch of Radishes - SOLD)
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