Still Life Snapshots – Setups from the Archive

Still life setups have always been part of my practice — not just as a teaching tool, but as a kind of miniature installation. For as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed arranging objects: first in my home, and later as part of my art practice.

When teaching colour, these setups become a way to explore balance and harmony. If the colours work together in the arrangement, it makes the student’s task easier — they can step into the painting with confidence, responding to relationships that already hold together.

Some of these scenes were thrown together in fifteen minutes with whatever was at hand in the studio. Others took much longer to resolve — carefully arranged, tweaked and rebalanced, sometimes even as students were already painting.

For me, these temporary arrangements are like compositions in their own right: a way of exploring space, shape, and tension through objects. And above all, they are a way of exploring colour.

When teaching, I sometimes frame this through colour harmony — how colours shift in relation to one another, and how small changes in tone, saturation or temperature can alter the whole balance of a painting. In Morandi’s restrained palette of greys, the smallest touch of warmth glows; by contrast, in Matisse’s bold saturated colours, the same note would all but disappear, where black is often used as a tool to anchor the full spectrum.Even within a single palette, material makes a difference: a blue cloth absorbs light differently from a blue enamel teapot, each asking for its own painterly response.

Over the years my studio setups have spanned this spectrum. Some were bold and patterned, others built from muted bottles, soft greys and gentle tonal shifts. Between these extremes came everything else: playful groupings of toys, seasonal flowers, and fragments of fabric gathered from around the studio. Each created its own atmosphere and asked for a different kind of attention.

During a recent photo clear-out, I found a stash of photographs of studio setups from classes past. Some I remembered clearly, others I’d completely forgotten. Seen together, they feel like a small archive and a celebration — of colour, of the joy of arranging, and of the way these temporary installations have shaped so many paintings over the years.

Still Life Snapshots