Rago Auctions

I paint personal refuges in the form of still lives and imagined landscapes - places to visit for solace, meditation and sanctuary. I work intuitively to create a connection between the viewer and the power of place, the web of life, the idea of nature itself. My approach to still life allows me to work with a number of themes that have long interested me, and draw me in again and again.  Thematically I am interested in the interaction between man – and manmade objects – and nature.  In a painted still life these ideas collapse on each other - and raise many questions.  Which is more beautiful – a rural landscape or a Chinese vase?  Which is more alive, which is more still?  Is the rendering of an egret or a mountainside on porcelain more or less profound than treatment of the same subject on canvas?  Is a nest a bowl?  Is a vase a broken egg?  And isn’t all of nature anthropomorphized in the sense that, inescapably, man sees nature through man’s eyes? 

Excerpted from David Kroll's artist statement, 2016