Still Life with Broken Cup, 8 in. (20 cm) in height, handbuilt cone 6 porcelain, fired multiple times.
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Still Life with One Fig, 7 in. (18 cm) in height, handbuilt cone 6 porcelain, fired multiple times. The pedestals upon which Shiftan’s still lifes perch are glazed kiln shelves.
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Still Life with Two Tulips and One Fig, 7 in. (18 cm) in height,
handbuilt cone 6 porcelain, fired multiple times, by Anat Shiftan, New
Paltz, New York. Shiftan often randomly stacks glazed bisqueware, which
become fused together through the firing process. |
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Enjoying the Still Life
by Leigh Taylor Mickeson
The colorful conglomerations of Anat Shiftan encourage us to slow down and contemplate the small things.
Contemplations of nature, the still lifes of Anat Shiftan are about looking and understanding and knowing. Like nature, they are simultaneously chaotic and controlled, seductive and repellent, dangerous and delicate, sexy and sweet. They celebrate the pleasure of color and the process of making and collecting objects. Shiftan explains that her still life series strives to “awaken wonder and show the fine line between beauty and corruption and the alluring magic of and in nature.”
Born in Jerusalem, Shiftan was raised by her nature-loving parents, a geologist and a baking instructor. With frequent family outdoor excursions, and flowers on the table every Sabbath, Shiftan’s childhood was immersed in nature’s influence. She remembers spending hours in a field of wild flowers across from her house. She recalls holding a yellow daisy so close to her eye that all she could see was the intense color of yellow. She would then pull it away from her eye, which would reveal the flower’s structure. This innocent wonder about her organic environment seeped into her creative endeavors as an adult.
Shiftan’s interest in clay and art really began with annual visits to a potter’s shop with her mother when she was a child. The shop, full of pottery and earth-packed floors, was magical, but Shiftan did not realize her potential as an artist until her senior year of college, when she took a pottery class at a clay studio in Jerusalem. It was then that she convinced herself that she should work in clay.
After two years at the Bezalel Academy for Art, she came to the United States and received her M.A. from Eastern Michigan University and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Design. Since 2003, she has been an assistant professor at SUNY, New Paltz.
An art educator knows she is in the right profession when she finds creative inspiration from her students and classroom experiences. Shiftan’s most recent body of work actually arose from an assignment she gave to her students. She was teaching them about making objects, and gave them an exercise in presentation: the still life. Shiftan assigned herself the same exercise. She found the challenge to be about much more than presentation. It was about perception, about working with clay; it was instantly autobiographical and explored the moral aspect of creating “stuff.” Shiftan embraced the action of making and collecting objects, accepting such accumulation as a form of expression. “As humans we have to produce stuff to express ourselves, but then we are populating the world with things and more things,” she says. So what should we do with these things? Present them.
For most three-dimensional art, the pedestal is the authority. Once a piece is placed upon a pedestal, it is instantly “art.” Commenting on this, Shiftan decided to present her “stuff” on a pedestal. Using a glazed kiln shelf as her platform, Shiftan began recording nature, just as the Dutch Renaissance painters did in their still lifes. Like the paintings, her pieces are about color and content, about seeing and perceiving. They are about our lives, our obsessions, about the beauty of nature and the passage of time.
In Still Life with One Fig, one of Shiftan’s first still life pieces, a sweeping landscape of celadon glazed porcelain sits atop a hard-edged, steel-gray pedestal. The sharp furled edges of the porcelain, delicately bunched together like frozen flower petals, create an expansive pillow for a plump chartreuse fig, which sits in the back right corner of the still life. The luscious fruit, a symbol of fertility and prosperity, appears inviting yet fated in its lonesome placement. At the same time, the simplicity of the composition takes on the meditative qualities of a Zen garden.
In life, we often walk past strewn leaves and fallen fruit without giving them much thought. But in a still life, we are asked to pay attention; to notice the beauty of their forms, the potency of their colors, the juxtaposition of their placement. We are asked to consider the objects, and wonder about their meaning. Within these works, “nature is an arranged presence with underlying tones of wealth, sensuality and seduction . . . these artificial nature scenes touch on the absence of the ‘original true’ nature in our life,” Shiftan explains.
The inexhaustible format of still life continued to excite Shiftan, and her next series of works abandoned the quietude of the celadon porcelain fields. Continuing to use a glazed kiln shelf as her authority, Shiftan began to randomly stack bisque-fired glazed objects atop the shelf. In the cone 6 firing process, the pieces fuse together where the glazes touch, the colors slightly melting into each other. The cacophony of objects, some soft and alluring, others sharp and dark, comments on the ambiguities of nature. We are pulled into the still life, wishing to taste the fig’s satiny flesh or finger the soft celadon flower petals. At the same time, the imbalance of the objects and the delicate, razor-sharp edges persuade us to resist.
For Shiftan, these still lifes are instantly autobiographical from process to product. She approaches these pieces as she does making test tiles, which is one of her most satisfying tasks in the art-making process. She piles the objects in a seemingly random fashion, but if you look closely the colors are well balanced, like a controlled experiment. In Still Life with Broken Cup a shattered white cup, a pinched hollow chartreuse tulip, a cobalt blue flower abstraction and a satiny pinkish fig are stacked on top of several additional flower abstractions and glazed porcelain shards. Nestled amongst the heap of objects are three small, dark-blue cylindrical test tiles. By inserting the tests into the still life, she comments on our placement in nature; our desire to understand and emulate the mysteries of nature.
In Still Life with Two Tulips and One Fig, the mound of objects overtakes the small, dark-blue pedestal, falling over the edge and populating the area to the left. Is Shiftan commenting on the power of nature and its authority over us in spite of our best efforts to control it? Or did a few objects slide off the glazed shelf in the firing, creating a happy accident? The classic triangular composition within the piece suggests that amongst such chaos exists balance and beauty. Whether Shiftan planned such symmetry or not remains to be seen.
The mysteries in this body of work reflect those we face daily in nature. No matter how well we plan for what nature or life has to bring us, it often takes us by surprise. Shiftan’s still lifes ask us to pay attention, however; to notice everything from the color of a juicy fig to the furled edges of a strewn leaf; to all at once revel in nature’s beauty and be calmed by the balance in the chaos of life.
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