the last still life!

Above are Wayne Thiebaud's "Rosebud Cakes" and Edouard Manet's "The Lemon"

From Adam Gopnik's "An American Painter" (an article about Wayne Thiebaud):

"Across the room [from Thiebaud's still life of two cakes] a Manet watercolor - not the real thing... but an aquatint copy... pictures another simply shaped food, a green apple. It has the same spareness, the same intensity of observation, the same love of a plain thing seen plain. Yet to look at it is to feel in touch with a classical contemplative tradition. The apple has a dapper dapple, a comfortable shimmer that suggests looking as a completely satisfying way of living. Gazing at transient things in the French tradition, the Manet apple seems to say, is in itself a way of making them last. Looking at transient things in the American tradition, the cakes seem to imply, creates a melancholy little comedy of longing and exclusion. You feel lured in and then you feel left out.

The emotional truth, or anyway the local feeling, hits. The French apple, though it points no moral, is in every sense composed. The two American cakes, though all dressed up as if for their own birthday party, seem by contrast plaintive, longing. The apple is calm; the cakes are sad. Not just sad, but nationally sad, familiarly sad. They radiate a peculiar emotion that we have sensed before in such lovely areas of American paint as those fruit bowls in Hopper's restaurant or the childrens building blocks in Eakins - a note of yearnig, a melancholy undercurrent of aspiration implanted even in things of pleasure that we recognize more easily than understand."

For homework I would like you to consider how artists use objects to create mood. Why does Adam Gopnik find Thiebaud's cakes sad, yet Manet's apple (or lemon) composed and stately? Are these qualities inherent to the objects themselves or are they communicated through the artists' use of materials and stylistic choices?

For next Monday (the 22nd), please compose one still life with the goal of creating a specific mood. You may use any objects you want and any media in your drawing. For this Wednesday (the 18th), I would like you to have considered your mood and to have determined some strategies for conveying this tone. Please write some ideas in your sketchbook, and maybe even sketch out some of them. I will discuss those ideas with you individually on Wednesday.

Below are images of paintings by Giorgio Morandi, one of the great masters of the still life. Think about how he has used color, material, and style to impart the few objects he paints with distinct emotion.