Fairfield Porter: The Art of the Still Life

"When I paint...it would satisfy me to make everything more beautiful"

---

BY REBECCA SANDBERG

Porter, Fairfield. Yawl in the Channel. 1974, oil on canvas.

Simplicity is one of those deeply primal ambitions - a mirage of blurred desire - that stirs us when we perceive the elevated yet unembellished depiction of everyday life as wonderful rather than banal. Wonder in the everyday is what American Realist painter Fairfield Porter (June 10, 1907 – September 18, 1975) considers in his intimate display of enchanted reality represented in still life. Inspired by intimist artists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, Porter consistently painted things as they were – loose representations of abstract gesture. Of his process, he states:

When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful. This partly means that a painting should contain a mystery, but not for mystery's sake: a mystery that is essential to reality.

The outcome of such a transfiguration of the everyday invites us into the warm and hospitable psychology of Porter’s subject matter as perfectly casual. He writes:

Subject matter must be normal in the sense that it does not appear sought after so much as simply happening to one. The profoundest order is revealed in what is most casual.

In a marvelous sentiment that echoes the capacity of Percy Shelley’s poetic language of still life as the “near scene in naked and severe simplicity” in his marvelous poem, “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude”, Porter states;

Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you already find here, or that will be given if you don’t try for it. When you arrange, you fail.

In avoiding the arranged or prepared look, Porter's works give a sense of the straightforward, somewhat mundane elements of the human experience - things as they are. And yet, ironically, surrendering to simplicity is often less complex than adhering to complexity itself. Here, in his depiction of his wife - the brilliant poet Anne Porter who had her own sense of still life in poetry, Porter captures a profound human moment of daily stillness.

Porter, Fairfield. Anne in a Striped Dress. 1967, oil on canvas.

Finding the intimate solidities in the “near scene” requires a commitment to reality and a further endorsement of leadership. "The role of a leader," so said Napoleon, "is to define reality and give hope." Maybe this is what artists offer by way of hope - a commitment to the absolute wonder and mystery of the universal reality, the “near scene” of the everyday - essentially; you are what you are right now.

Fairfield Porter, Girl and Geranium. 1963, oil on canvas.

Because of the intense illumination that simplicity offers, the required sacrifice shutters amid modern complexity – the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous landscape filled with layers of exhaustion and confusion. Porter’s remarkable commitment to the reality of the everyday – things as they are – echoes the magnificent poetic uttering of T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding”, when he says, “complete simplicity costs no less than everything”.