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FRUIT BOWL, GRAPES
AND ORANGES
1956
Skov generally
turned to the objects immediately available on the kitchen and dinner
tables for his still-life motifs. During the summer and fall seasons fresh
fruits and flowers provided an kaleidoscope of changing, perishable colors
and forms inspiring his imagination and demanding immediate action. His
favorite fruits appear in many of his still-lifes, placed in bowls or
directly on the table, singly or several together in combination with
pitchers, bottles, sculptures or tableware. Apples, pears and oranges
appear as his most frequent fruit motifs, but in accordance with the season
and the increasing fruit imports from Southern Europe, also grapes, bananas, cherries, plums and
several types of melon were sometimes captured in Skov’s paintings. As his
changing approach to color treatment and expression of form and space
progressed from one period to the next, he kept returning to the
fruit-motif, and practically all his Neo-cubist periods show examples of
his continued metamorphosis of these simple, colorful objects.
The “Still-life
with Fruit Bowl, Grapes and Oranges”, from the summer of 1956 in Copenhagen, provides an example of Skov’s Synthetic
Neo-cubist treatment of the fruit motif. This painting depicts a fruit bowl
containing an orange and a bunch of red grapes, standing on a brown table
that is covered with a white table cloth. A white plate to the right holds
a white napkin and two light-green plums, while on the left rim of the
table a white milk bottle stands behind a second orange. Light entering
through the window at the back throws prisms of shadow over the objects
which also are rendered into facets of light playing inside as well as
outside of their contours.
Although quite
colorful, the painting is characterized by its lightness, an almost
atmospheric effect resulting from the extensive use of white and light gray
providing a neutral base for the bright orange and light green that
otherwise dominate the picture. The composition is stabilized by the dark,
horizontal table edge and the vertical window frames echoing the table legs
below, and also by the interaction between the centralized elliptical
space, outlined by the fruit bowl, and the triangle which is anchored by
the grapes at the top and the orange and plums located respectively at the
bottom left and right corners of the table.
Allowing the viewer
a short span of time for the interaction of the
multi-contoured objects and the elements of the composition, the
three-dimensional space will seem to reach out towards the observer, almost
in the manner of a pop-out greeting card: the white plate with the
two plums
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