I am inspired to paint by the world around me, and as I am short-sighted I am drawn to close inspection rather than broad distant viewing. Ever since childhood I have been fascinated by the precise, detailed realism of the best early Flemish painters on the one hand, and on the other by the light, subtlety and tonal continuity of the best of Vermeer. My training at the Julian Ashton Art School in tonal realism and careful academic figure drawing accorded perfectly with my own predilections, but it was not until I had been able to study in several of the great galleries of Europe that it dawned on me one day in 1979 that what I should be doing was sharp-focus realism, and in particular, still-life. I have been doing that ever since.

Still-life best enables me to combine what I consider important in picture making: careful, balanced composition, tonal subtlety, light, form and depth. It is important to me that my pictures be as real as possible, but it is equally important that they be aesthetic wholes, achieved by the interplay of shapes, forms and spaces, so that they have an appearance of inevitability and cannot be mistaken for snapshots. They are not mere reproductions of casual groupings of objects.

I begin a picture by carefully arranging the objects on a bench in front of the easel and when I am satisfied with the composition, I block in the arrangement broadly, so that I can see the total effect of the composition, colour and tone. I then proceed to paint each part of the picture slowly and painstakingly with the smallest brushes I can find, until at the end no brushstrokes are visible. Each of my larger pictures requires three to four months of full-time work to complete. At no stage do I make use of photographs; everything in the finished picture is the product of what I see in the subject to accord with the effect or mood I am trying to create. I do not merely copy the group I have set up. I avoid mechanical aids to representation, as I feel that they interpose a filter between my emotional reaction to the subject and the resulting picture. Even the most precise realist picture should still be a visual poem, and not an illustration from a text book on optics.

A preference for peace, calm and tranquillity is an essential part of my emotional nature, and these are qualities I particularly associate with still-life painting, which to me seems to require a quiet, meditative approach. Turbulence, torment and conflict have no interest for me whatsoever. Still-life furthermore best enables me to realise the vision I have of what my painting should be. All sincere artists have a vision of a perfect picture, and we spend our lives trying to achieve it.

Ross Harvey
1 August 2004