Quotidian Death
Still Life with Muskrat, Raccoon, and Sunflowers
What I love about still life is the opportunity to reflect on all those small, mundane, ways that death exerts its presence throughout the day-to-day grind.
The flowers on the kitchen table fade and whither.
The apples, in their basket, rot so slowly it’s almost imperceptible–the flesh goes soft and brown, the skin wrinkles, collapses into deep pockmarks, something viscous and faintly sweet-smelling collects on the marble countertop.
And my mother keeps sending her weekly emails, detailing symptoms, diagnoses, dosages.
“He takes this many milligrams of that drug three times a day, now. It used to be a lower dosage five times a day, but the doctor changed the course. … There’s some swelling following the procedure; doctor says it’s normal, should subside in a week or so, we’ll keep you posted…”
And she talks about the relatives out East: who has been admitted to hospital, how aunt so-so’s cholesterol numbers are looking, who had what lump on their inner thigh biopsied. Sometimes the subjects of these narratives are so distantly related to me that I struggle to place the names. She knows this, of course, and often she provides parenthetical information clarifying how these people are related to me. My second cousin–I was at his wedding, apparently, but would have been too young to remember–has dementia and is falling a lot. Someone is looking into options for hospice care.
Every week she sends the same message: a catalogue of bodily disintegrations, a story of deterioration spanning generations and provinces.
And every week I send the same response.
“Thanks for the update… Hope you guys are keeping well… Best wishes…”
The tomatoes went moldy before we got a chance to eat them.
That mug you liked shattered in the dishwasher last week.
The hedge rows that frame the aviary are littered with the carcasses of red robins.
This is what I love about still life; there’s something honest and quotidian about this approach to thinking about mortality that is not well-captured in other media. Fruit baskets, floral bouquets, capsized drinking vessels–a catalogue of tiny deaths. In still life, as in real life, we have the core of the human condition–our insurmountable struggle against the certainty of our own mortality–played out in microcosm on the breakfast table every morning.
Anatomy of an Image
Not so long ago, a friend stopped by my house to drop off a dead muskrat.
Susan makes jewelry and home decor from ethically-sourced animal remains, and she had scavenged the mummified creature somewhere on her property. The thing was too old and too deteriorated to be useful for her own work. But I immediately fell in love with the texture of that mummified skin and I was very enthusiastic to get my hands on the creature and take some pictures. With this composition–the first in a series of still lifes–I wanted to emphasize the surprising similarity between the mummified animal skill and the wilted flower petals and rotten potatoes that also decorate the table. (Long time followers will likely recognize the mummified raccoon head in this image; it was also the basis for the series at the heart of Baudelaire’s A Carcass.)
This image, like all of my still life, draws significantly from the works of the classical painters like Pieter Claesz, Goya, and Caravaggio. Not only is my approach to lighting and editing influenced by those paintings, I also tend to use a lot of motifs that are familiar from the genre. Here, as in all still life, the dead animals and wilted flowers are intended as reminders of mortality, of the idea that all beauty is transient. The tipped cup, with its precarious placement near the edge of the table, is usually understood as a metaphor for the fragility of life.
As with my recent rat still life, the guiding principle for this composition was to have the elements arranged in a triangular geometry. This is, yet again, a technique that I learned from the Dutch masters and I feel like it adds a timeless quality to an image.
I have several more arrangement in this series. Stay tuned for more!