Mark Doty's Still Life

“I have fallen in love with a painting… and the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

So begins Mark Doty’s book Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, as he explores the rhapsody of viewing a still life painting by the Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. More than an essay, though not quite a memoir, the book is an extended meditation on art and life, full of lyric observation and free association sure to carve a place for Doty in the history of writers drawn to the visual expressions of art.

The relationship between writers and the visual arts is nothing new. For Mark Doty it is the 17^th century Dutch still life painters that hold his rapture. Before him John Updike contemplated the Americans—Wyeth’s realism, Hopper’s light, Jackson Pollock’s frantic grace. Ralph Ellison wrote of the triumphant color of Romare Bearden. The modern German poet Rainer Maria Rilke completed many of his best works under the influence of Rodin’s bronze sculptures and was later awed by the paintings of Cézanne.

When Rilke encountered the work of Cézanne exhibited at the Salon d’ Automne during his stay in Paris in 1907, the poet visited the galleries day after day for months and wrote letters home to his wife. In those letters, later published as Letters on Cezanne, the poet ruminates on the artist’s paintings—still lifes, reclining nudes, landscapes—and the ways, like language, they communicate to the viewer. Like Rilke’s collection, Mark Doty’s book bears the intimacy of a letter home while it explores the boundaries of observation, considers the representation of objects, and exemplifies to what degree one artist’s eye can penetrate the essence of another’s art.

Though Doty’s observations on art are widely applicable to still life painting, it is Jan Davidsz de Heem’s “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” and Adriaen Coorte’s “Still Life with Asparagus” that garner most of Doty’s reverence. While sparing readers much of the art history and context for the 17^th Dutch genre painting, Doty focuses his lens on the depiction of objects and the intimacy they maintain on an aging canvas, like the memory of objects in one’s own life. Of still life painting, he writes, “It is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we’re everywhere.”

Like Doty’s poems, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon is full of exquisite detail. Doty articulates the spiritual nature of artistic encounter. “In the light that has come toward me through a canvas the size of a school notebook,” Doty writes, “we are all walking in the light of a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to their stem.” Ultimately, he casts his attention on intimacy, memory, death, and the human condition.

In this sense Doty creates his own still life, weaving the memory of objects from his past, like the “red, pinwheeled peppermints” he remembered among the contents of his grandmother’s purse when he was a boy in rural Tennessee in the 1950s, “each wrapped in a shiny square of cellophane which twists at the ends into little flourishes.” The blue and white china platter among the vast collection of objects obtained at antique auctions and flea markets with his late partner, Wally, amidst other objects filling the rooms of the house, that amass to “tableaux and still lifes of old things spilling over, one season’s purchases crowding out the last’s.” With refreshing willingness to share these moments sparingly, Doty allows objects to create deeply moving illustrations of the larger concept at hand while allowing space for dialogue with a reader’s own thoughts on art and intimacy—informal invitations to join the great correspondence des arts. In writing, like in painting, there seems a sort of aesthetic mysticism that accompanies the act of creating from observation. Description is “an act of interiorizing what we see,” Doty writes. “Description delineates the world, yes, but in doing so it informs what’s seen with ourselves.”

It is through such suggestions, understated yet consistent, that Doty upholds his thread of spirituality, the transient nature—and ultimate continuity—of life and, furthermore, suggests a connection between elements of human existence and the depiction of objects in a still life painting, all of which contain a history of their own significance. They did, after all, belong to someone. “The paintings seem to refer to this life of ownership,” he writes, “and to suggest something of the feeling attached to things, while withholding any narrative.” Antiques acquire beauty as they mature. The same is true of paintings—their glazes crack, their coloration ages. Art is itself imbued with its own life, and in its greatest manifestations, it serves to bind us to the world. Through his poetic eye, Doty bestows the grace of still life and “the deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

~ Jericho Parms