Still Life with Falling Candles
Chris Gollon enjoyed painting on Indian Khadi paper for its texture and rigidity, and as with much of his still life, these paintings hint at a human drama beyond the image. One technique he employed was to deliberately make the shadows all wrong, which serves to animate the objects, so they become more than they seem. In the tradition of still life painting, lit candles represent the renewal of hope and smoke the temporality of material wealth.
In the early tradition of European still life painting, which began in Toledo, the old capital of Spain, objects were thought to have religious symbolism. For example, the lemon was fidelity in love, water was the Virgin Mary. Hope was symbolised by a lit candle.
Chris Gollon was a great painter of human relationships and human dramas, which he portrayed with great empathy, often with warm humour. Even in still life he was able to allude to a human drama or situation, which art historian Tamsin Pickeral describes so well in her book on Chris Gollon’s life and work ‘Humanity in Art’, endorsed by Bill Bryson OBE. As Pickeral notes, by making the shadows all deliberately wrong, Gollon animates his objects, and breathes into them a human situation.
