Daniel Arrhakis - Visual Arts says:

A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, wood, vegetables, fish, wine, etc.) or human-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, clocks, pipes, violins, etc.).

With origins in the Middle Ages and Ancient Greco-Roman art, still-life painting emerged as a distinct genre and professional specialization in Western painting by the late 16th century, and has remained significant since then.
One advantage of the still-life artform is that it allows an artist much freedom to experiment with the arrangement of elements within a composition of a painting.

Still life, as a particular genre, began with Netherlandish painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the English term still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven.
Still life can be a celebration of material pleasures such as food and wine, or often a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures and of the brevity of human life (Memento Mori).
A Memento Mori is an artwork designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the shortness and fragility of human life.

Early still-life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted.
A basic memento mori painting would be a portrait with a skull but other symbols commonly found are hour glasses or clocks, extinguished or guttering candles, fruit, and flowers.

Closely related to the memento mori picture is the Vanitas Still Life. In addition to the symbols of mortality these may include other symbols such as musical instruments, wine and books to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods. The term originally comes from the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’

The vanitas and memento mori picture became popular in the seventeenth century, in a religious age when almost everyone believed that life on earth was merely a preparation for an afterlife. However, modern artists have continued to explore this genre.

In Spanish art, a bodegón is a still-life painting depicting pantry items, such as victuals, game, and drink, often arranged on a simple stone slab, and also a painting with one or more figures, but significant still-life elements, typically set in a kitchen or tavern. Starting in the Baroque period, such paintings became popular in Spain in the second quarter of the 17th century.

Still-life painting in Spain, also called bodegones, was austere. It differed from Dutch still life, which often contained rich banquets surrounded by ornate and luxurious items of fabric or glass.
The game in Spanish paintings is often plain dead animals still waiting to be skinned. The fruits and vegetables are uncooked. The backgrounds are bleak or plain wood geometric blocks, often creating a surrealist air.

Many leading Italian artists in other genre, also produced some still-life paintings. In particular, Caravaggio applied his influential form of naturalism to still life. His Basket of Fruit (c. 1595–1600) is one of the first examples of pure still life, precisely rendered and set at eye level.

However, it was not until the final decline of the Academic hierarchy in Europe, and the rise of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, that technique and color harmony triumphed over subject matter, and that still life was once again avidly practiced by artists.
In his early still life, Claude Monet shows the influence of Fantin-Latour, but is one of the first to break the tradition of the dark background, which Pierre-Auguste Renoir also discards in Still Life with Bouquet and Fan (1871), with its bright orange background.

Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" paintings are some of the best-known 19th-century still-life paintings. Van Gogh uses mostly tones of yellow and rather flat rendering to make a memorable contribution to still-life history. His Still Life with Drawing Board (1889) is a self-portrait in still-life form, with Van Gogh depicting many items of his personal life, including his pipe, simple food (onions), an inspirational book, and a letter from his brother, all laid out on his table, without his own image present. He also painted his own version of a vanitas painting Still Life with Open Bible, Candle, and Book (1885)

The still life, as well as other representational art, continued to evolve and adjust until mid-century when total abstraction, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, eliminated all recognizable content.

Rejecting the flattening of space by Cubists, Marcel Duchamp and other members of the Dada movement, went in a radically different direction, creating 3-D "ready-made" still-life sculptures. As part of restoring some symbolic meaning to still life, the Futurists and the Surrealists placed recognizable still-life objects in their dreamscapes. In Joan Miró's still-life paintings, objects appear weightless and float in lightly suggested two-dimensional space, and even mountains are drawn as simple lines.

When 20th-century American artists became aware of European Modernism, they began to interpret still-life subjects with a combination of American realism and Cubist-derived abstraction. Typical of the American still-life works of this period are the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley, and the photographs of Edward Weston. O'Keeffe's ultra-closeup flower paintings reveal both the physical structure and the emotional subtext of petals and leaves in an unprecedented manner.

In Mexico, starting in the 1930s, Frida Kahlo and other artists created their own brand of Surrealism, featuring native foods and cultural motifs in their still-life paintings.

Starting in the 1930s, abstract expressionism severely reduced still life to raw depictions of form and colour, until by the 1950s, total abstraction dominated the art world. However, pop art in the 1960s and 1970s reversed the trend and created a new form of still life.

Much pop art (such as Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans") is based on still life, but its true subject is most often the commodified image of the commercial product represented rather than the physical still-life object itself. Roy Lichtenstein's Still Life with Goldfish Bowl (1972) combines the pure colours of Matisse with the pop iconography of Warhol.

During the 20th and 21st centuries, the notion of the still life has been extended beyond the traditional two dimensional art forms of painting into video art and three dimensional art forms such as sculpture, performance and installation. Some mixed media still-life works employ found objects, photography, video, and sound, and even spill out from ceiling to floor and fill an entire room in a gallery.

Later still-life works are produced with a variety of media and technology, such as found objects, photography, computer graphics, video and Artificial Inteligence.

You can explore more this unique theme in the links below :

Still life - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_life

Still life | Tate www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/still-life

Memento mori | Tate www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/memento-mori

Vanitas | Tate www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/v/vanitas

In the link below you can see and explore a Vanitas Still Life painting - Vanitas Still Life, c. 1665/1670 of the painter Jan van Kessel the Elder (painter) Flemish, 1626 - 1679

Vanitas Still Life www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.93323.html

What makes a painting poetic?
A picture is likely to be poetic if it leaves out detail or conceals information or conveys the passage of time or if it achieves a mood that is harmonious, delicate, elegant, romantic, majestic, or melancholy.

We are sure that you will not lack inspiration to create unique Still Life Art compositions that will definitely surprise us in this challenge!

If you use some stock images, be sure that they have Public Domain Attribution for you can use them and provide a link. In the case of use of images of Artificial Intelligence Art Generators, reference must be made.

We accept Photography, Art Photography or other Visual Arts with or without manipulation but must have relation with the theme !

Be creative and have fun, Welcome dear friends !! : )

Rules:

1) You must be a member of this group.

2) This contest will be open from November 13 To December 13 of 2023.

Contest winners will be featured on the about page of the Mystic Challenge Group and in a Gallery on Flickr that will be shared in Twitter.

3) You must vote to win . Please enter only if you plan to vote.
Any group member, whether participating in the contest or not, is welcome to vote.


4) The FOUR images voted best will be the winners !! Ties may be broken by the administrator(s) for that final objective.


5) Members may submit 4 (Four) original images, however must be made/uploaded in 2023 and respect the main theme.


6) Your image must not have won in any previous contests of
this group.

7) Please post in medium (500) size; title and number your work.


8) In the challenges of our groups we don't accept explicit total nudity and the general rules of the group are also taken into account .

9) In the case of using stock images, in addition to providing the link, they must show obvious manipulation, editing or transformation, otherwise they will be refused. In the case of use of images of Artificial Intelligence Art Generators, reference must be made.

10) Please support our artists by awarding entries with the award code provided or a comment.

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<b> Wonderful Art ! </b>
<b>Poetic Still Life Challenge - November / December 2023 </b>
</b><a href="https://www.flickr.com/groups/challenges_community_group/discuss/72157721919753773/">
<img
src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53327402186_3f818ca420_m.jpg" width="231" height="240" alt=" Poetic Still Life Challenge - November / December 2023 " /></a>



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it will be like this :


Wonderful Art !
Poetic Still Life Challenge - November / December 2023




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INSTRUCTIONS FOR ADDING IMAGES TO THE CONTEST (Thanks To
Paul Cowie)

Hopefully this will help>>>
Here are the instructions on how to post an image to the contest:

- Go to the image you want to post in the contest.
- Click on the white arrow icon, on the lower right side of the image.
(A menu will open. It will say SHARE, EMBED, EMAIL, ETC., on top.)
- Click on EMBED (that will highlight a Code)
- Click on the tiny black triangle in the area which shows a size.
- Choose Medium 500 x - - -
- Rest your pointer on the highlighted Code,
- Then Right Click on that Code and choose Copy.

Next, go to the Group's contest thread.

- Click on the first available space.
- Then Right Click and choose Paste.
- Your image should show up in that space.
- Number and Title your image.
- Lastly, click on the blue Post Now button.

And you're done!
Originally posted at 6:59PM, 13 November 2023 PDT (permalink)
Daniel Arrhakis - Visual Arts edited this topic 7 months ago.