Irving Penn Still Life

 Hey Teach, I don’t know how I manage to do this every semester but this time I’m blaming myself less, because I had so much work to do.

Anyways, here’s my view of Irving Penn.

When you first spoke about him and showed us photos my first thought was, Oooh. Because it’s not really a style I see often, sadly I am writing about his still life’s today, but who knows, maybe those will be just as interesting as his portraits.

They definitely aren’t bad, and there’s a few in here that really evoke some feelings in me, ones that hold motion in the still life, specifically one of a flower. It’s incredibly gorgeous, morning dew sitting on it, twirling in the air, striped black and white. I get the feeling that Irving Penn was an eccentric with an eye for details based on these still life’s because a lot of them are absurd, but every few are composed perfectly to the point you can tell that it took a very long time to set up. Specifically the few that two in color that are play items and kitchen items, they are sort of built up, or holding a silhouette or form. I don’t  know how much that I can grasp or enjoy from these sort of photos, because honestly I find that still lives bore me? But the ones that do pull me in are ones that either feel like they are recording the presence of life in absence of it, the absurdly weird ones that destroy the reality we live in, or the ones that capture a beautiful composition. I think that it is a very high bar to make a genuinely interesting still life’s because of how little you get to work with, its simply what’s there and if that’s not interesting your still life is gonna suck and be boring. I think that’s why these sorts of still life’s that are a bit more mysterious thought provoking and leaving a story become interesting or succeed to me. (I apologize for not speaking more on the artist but I know you like our personal thoughts and since it is specifically about still life’s i found that this is simply where I had the most to talk about). To go deeper I feel that I’m finding myself a bit shaky on my art. I don’t know If I find any of my works truthful? I also am concerned that I’m not making things that I find show my perception, maybe I could find more of it through still life’s since they’re so different. I don’t know. I find that I have a dark mind but not in terms of horror, and its really hard to translate my brain into reality. Hopefully I can eventually get something, but for now I feel the only thing that I captured that truly feels like my brain is that one image with the fire veins.

Here’s some of Penn’s photos, the ones I was referencing.






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