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to include specific texture, any unique detail of design or
resulting from usage, the special quality of the light in a particular room
at a particular time, and so on. Yet, he wished to accomplish the
characterization of objects without confining the resulting painting to be
a merely momentary visual experience on his part, since one of his
principal objectives was to render the motifs timeless in the sense of
being representative, real objects visualized in our real four-dimensional,
universal space-time-continuum.
In the development
of his paintings, Skov structured his design purposely to work in
collaboration with the viewer’s active interpretation; it should not merely
present the finished picture to a passive observer. The visual stimuli he
provided, representing the objects and space that together comprise his
motifs, were to be seen as initiators to the visual experience, since they
assume their full shapes and true dimensionality only as the viewer
eventually sees them evolving perceptively out of the planar surface. And
their individuality in terms of color, texture and design, as well as any
incremental perception of mobility as the object evolves out of the plane,
also serve to increase the viewer’s sensing of reality of the
space-cum-objects presented in the painting.
Three series of
paintings and studies of still-lifes, depicting respectively “Bread-slicer
and Flask”, “Table with Red Cabbage and Flask”, and “Fishwife at
Gammelstrand”, made in 1958, exemplify Skov’s pictorial solutions to these
challenges and his search for the unusual in the commonplace.
STILL-LIFE WITH
BREAD-SLICER, CARAFE
1958 - [Oil on canvas, 63 X 81 cm, Cat. # 58-13]
Until recently,
when pre-sliced bread from supermarkets eventually made it obsolete, the
manual bread-slicing device was a commonplace kitchen tool in Denmark, used for cutting the loaves of dense, Danish
black rye-bread. It consists of a short, but broad, hinged guillotine
knife, mounted at one end of a wooden, square, L-shaped box about the size
of a loaf of bread, set at a forty-five degree angle. Its use was
ubiquitous in Germany and Scandinavia and
the design may well be unique to Northern Europe.
It presents an intriguing challenge for the Cubist painter in terms of how
convincingly he will be able to represent its shape and function, and
particularly its provocative three-dimensionality, in accordance with the
rather rigorously non-illusionistic, aesthetically ordained paradigm.
During 1958 - 1959, Skov made numerous studies and a series of at least
five paintings based on this motif in combination with fruits, a knife,
bottles, a wine carafe and a glass.
One example from
this series, is the “Still-life with Bread-slicer,
Carafe and Pears” [Oil on canvas, 63 X 81 cm, Cat. # 58-13], which
shows a table top with two pears, a transparent, green crystal
carafe,
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