Letters

Three still lives

Still life with hands

— A room, lit to mild intensity, perceived diagonally-inwards through a window so the back corner is a perfect vertical in centre frame. The gentle melange of vague summer sounds entering with the light — insects and distant birds, the restless hum of a windless afternoon. Otherwise an almost liquid stillness. A cast iron or dark-galvanised fireplace is partially obscured by a wooden table, a simple wooden table with a large bowl of fruit — mostly red and yellow apples — and a pair of hands naked from the forearm down, neatly folded right over left. The pale hands of a woman otherwise obscured by the window frame, pale but finely tethered and tapered, the fingernails unseen but suggestively long. By either a trick of the light or the poverty of objects, one's eye alternates between the colour of the fruit radiating spectral vitality and warmth, and the austere moon white of the soft-rendered skin, whose almost abstract placement fills centre-focus whilst remaining sidereal to the whole.

Still life with phone

— A married couple, dynamically frozen mid-frame, mid-sentence. He has a mobile at his right ear and an open planner in his left hand; he is waiting for a lull in a seeming one-way conversation with a prosaic friend and has chosen to fill the moment with a conciliatory/conspiratorial look to his wife. Who is handing him a slip of paper with an inked message or signature, in a way that highlights his lack of spare limbs to receive it. She has just entered through a door she is still holding because she isn't expecting to stay long and doesn't want to become involved in her husband's dealings, nor the room where they occur. She has the kind of round anticipated movement that has reached perigee and will presently rebound out the door. She avoids her husband's eye-contact, tainted with mock despair, because she doesn't want to impair her movement. She has, presumably, a stack of things to do elsewhere and seems unnecessarily put out in her role as messenger. She is pure movement to her partner's static.

Nature morte

— In what must be a disaster scene, a corpse lies sprawled and crumpled on its back in a mess of damaged, deranged and decomposing fruit, splintered woods, detritus and rubble. It is effectively fleeced of its clothing; its skin is raw and pale; a palm lies open and lacerated — halfway, expressively, between gesture and emptiness. The face is turned away but the wreck of the head leaves nothing wanting. The fruits are messy and largely drained of juice through there's still a strong air of mingled vegetable product, of late summer stockpiles which farmers feed their swine. A closer, patient eye would have deduced an astonishing variety of fruit type, colour and texture; one would have found hidden nuts and berries and seeds and husks amongst the litter and wreckage. Green stems and leaves now swell with brown and curl with decay — the quiet downward course of becoming. One would've felt acutely the last intense peak of afternoon heat in this decaying trough, one would've seen the flies settle in to finish what summer alone couldn't accomplish.