teacher: write a 5 page essay analyzing this
me: it’s not that deep 🏊🏼
I swear to god they’re so dramatic. Even in art history they read into what an apple or fly means like BICH maybe they’re just in the painting chilling. Y DOES IT NEED A MEANING
Yo, makes me laugh that you say this. Because you’re actually right
At the time artists started painting still life (early renaissance), painters didn’t bother with meanings at all. It was a technical exercise. Seeing how good their techniques were
But painting is expensive as fuck and you gotta pay for pigments and shit, so you had to be able to sell your shitty still life, to the people who pay for your pigments and shit. But they didn’t want still life paintings, because it was… just food….. They wanted Jesus and bible scenes and such. Not apples and shit. Because rich people loved religion. And were pretentious as fuck. Why have an apple painting at home when you can have men freaking out over zombie Jesus
So artists were like ok, see, you don’t get it. The apple refers to the original sin, and all the fruits represent your wealth and such. But the skull’s there to remind you that your wealth doesn’t matter, you’ll die someday anyway
Because that was a popular thing at the time, being rich but having symbolic stuff that remind you that you’ll die someday despite being rich. Rich people were weird. And pretentious
So painters BULLSHITTED all that symbolic stuff around the things they put in their still life paintings to make the boring painting exercises appealing to the gullible (and pretentious) rich people that commissioned them. And rich people gobbled it aaaalllllll up
And that’s how we still have still life paintings from most famous renaissance artists today and that they’re in such good condition, because still life paintings became THE shit amongst rich people and they bought them and kept them at home. Instead of remaining stuck in a dusty, shitty painting workshop, to be forgotten beneath tons of other stuff and rot
And there was this whole lexicon and symbolism dictionary created around still life paintings at the time, like each object was meant to represent something and there began to be conventions and stuff
But they only ever were technical painting exercises
It never was that deep
I love this post bc I majored in Art History I was always saying, “Maybe they just liked pears” and shit and my professors were always so mad at me.
This story was different actually??? And even better???
The girl, Brooklyn Andracke, used to wave at the truck every thursday and the trashman waved her back. It was a very important to her to do it every week.
It was HER birthday, and she decided that she wanted to share her birthday cake with the trashman. She also wanted to meet her hero, whose name is Delvar Dopson.
The girl’s mother thanked Delvar for his work and explained to him how important it is for Brooklyn to wave at him every thursday.
He was pretty surprised but he admitted that every time he drove near the house he hoped that the girl would wave at him.
That’s not the end of the story though. Next week Delvar had a surprise for the little girl.
He brought her a bunch of amazing birthday gifts!
They both got quite popular, and Delvar is getting a lot of thank you messages from trashmen from all over the world for representing them in such a good way.
