Googling ‘still life blogs’ summons a list of photographic blogs, written blogs, as well as a few blogs about oil painting. The term ‘still life’ refers to a drawing, painting, or photograph of an arrangement of one or more non-living objects. In French, they are known as nature morte, dead nature.

I began my foray into still life painting to visualize what diatoms would look like on land. Diatoms are microscopic organisms that live in the ocean and photosynthesize. They are the base of the marine food web, an ocean analogue for plants.

Still Life With Glasses Red Yellow Green 14" x 11" Oil on Panel 2020 © Liz Ewings

What would diatoms look like on land? I have photos of them taken under a microscope. Their appearance changes dramatically with different lighting, so they would probably look completely different out of the water. But like what? The exterior of a diatom is made of glass, and inside are colored pigments used for photosynthesis. Glasses filled with colored water seem like the best available proxy. I used a completely blank light colored paper background to separate the colors of the reflections and shadows from everything else.

Reflections of colored light on other glasses and in their shadows fascinate me. I added a plastic bottle half filled with colored water to see the difference in texture and reflectivity between glass and plastic.

Still Life With Overlap 11" x 14" Oil on board. 2020 © Liz Ewings

Once I noticed how the colors played off other glasses, I thought it would be interesting to line the glasses up and look through them at the transparency. And because the interplay between the objects is interesting. And aren’t relationships the only thing that really matters to humans?

Is an iPhone photograph of a painting of glasses of colored water. Is that a meta still life? Second derivative of a still life? Or just a really slow snap?