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This is an excerpt from an article called "Kitchen Art" at Jellypress.com Seated at my easel late one night looking at a careful arrangement of beautiful objects I had placed on a counter-top, I had an epiphany. Why am I such a curator in my paintings when real life is so messy and full of movement?  As an exercise, I began taking photos of my subject matter without looking through the view finder in order to force myself out of my conventional way of seeing. This photo of my sugar canister is one of the first. Check in here for more as the work progresses, and in the meantime see the beautiful Cotån mentioned in the quote below by clicking here. “The kitchen pictures or bodegones of Juan Sånchez Cotån (1561 - 1627) are conceived from the beginning as exercises in the renunciation of normal human priorities . . . It would not be enough simply to record the fruit and vegetables and game as they are; mere realism would not bite deep enough into vision to dislodge the habitual blindnesses and vanities which lurk there . . .The enemy is a mode of seeing which thinks it knows in advance what is worth looking at and what is not; against that the image presents the constant surprise of things seen for the first time.” From Looking At The Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting by Norman Bryson (Harvard University Press, 1990.) Here's the link: http://jellypress.com/article/kitchen_art/