Five Spot Still Life 1990

Ralph Goings made this still life painting, Five Spot, of objects on a table. The colors are muted, almost like a memory, and the paint is so smooth you can barely see the brushstrokes. It’s a process of careful layering, each glaze building up the illusion of reality. Look at the surface of the table. Goings has captured the way light bounces off its surface, creating these hazy reflections that almost mimic the objects themselves. You can almost feel the cool, slick surface beneath your fingertips, and the way the colours all bleed into one another gives the image the quality of a faded photograph. This kind of realistic painting reminds me of Gerhard Richter, another artist who uses the language of photography to create paintings that are both familiar and strange. What can this kind of still life tell us about the nature of reality, and about the objects we surround ourselves with every day?