Glass Compote 1940

Ralph Chessé made "Glass Compote" with coloured inks in 1940, and I can just imagine him layering the inks to get those luscious tones. I sympathize with the artist here! It's a bit like how I feel when I'm wrestling with a painting. There's a certain tension between the domestic and the painterly, and you can see it in those curtain folds, and in the way he’s balanced the fruit. It’s not about perfection, but about intuition. There is a lovely conversation happening in Chessé's work between abstraction and representation, with the grapes and the bananas. It reminds me that, as painters, we are always in dialogue with those who came before us, taking from them, adding to the conversation, and changing the course of art history one painting at a time.