Ever see a painting of a bowl of fruit and wonder, “What the heck would make somebody paint a bowl of fruit…and why should I want to look at it?” To be honest, I used to be one of those people – and I still can be sometimes. Still lifes (yep, in this context it’s “lifes,” not “lives”) often take me more energy and concentration to enjoy than a landscape or portrait does, but usually, the extra focus is worth the additional work.

Still life paintings, which are essentially just paintings featuring inanimate objects positioned by the artist in a plain or nondescript background, have a long history in European painting and have even been found in ancient tombs. Since those earliest known interpretations of the genre, the point has tended to be the same – take ordinary objects and position them in a way that they leave the viewer with a symbolic moral.

Today, you and I might look at that painting of a vase of flowers and think, “Sure, it’s pretty, but it doesn’t mean anything to me.” A lot of the reason that you and I don’t see the symbols is that we don’t live in the same cultural context in which the painting was created. To the people who lived in the time in which the canvas was painted, the symbols would be clear. Sure, to us, a watch might not symbolize temperance like it did for the 17th century Dutch, but to them, a pink ribbon probably didn’t symbolize the battle against breast cancer like it does for us. And plenty of the symbols do make sense, if you just think about them a little bit. A lemon? Well, that’s the simultaneous bitterness and sweetness of life. How about a delicious looking strawberry with a small spot of mold on it? Life is good but short, so enjoy it while you can. See – it’s not so hard to figure out, is it?

If you decide to commission your own still life oil painting from a photograph, you have a lot of options. In setting up your own still life, you can select objects that everyone will recognize and understand symbolically – like a display of your dried wedding bouquet, your toasting flutes, a half empty bottle of champagne, and one of white high-heeled shoes you wore down the aisle. You can also pick something that will be less identifiable to others; a friend of mine recently purchased a painting of a bare tree with two birds in it – a special symbol between her and her husband – for him as an anniversary gift.

And don’t let your own still life painting get bogged down in symbols and deep convoluted meanings, if that’s not what you’re into. The Impressionists started painting still lifes of blooming flowers and ripe fruit for no reason other than that it was beautiful. As their name implied, the Impressionists focused on the impression they got from an object, and beauty for beauty’s sake was perfectly acceptable to them…and it is for your own photo oil painting, too. Live in a cold climate where really fresh flowers are hard to come by? Then maybe a perpetually blooming bouquet painted onto canvas is just what you need!

Because a true still life is, more than other genres, a completely artificial and posed form, finding an existing photograph of a genuine still life painting can be difficult…but creating one for a painting can be pretty fun! Within the next few weeks, I’ll offer you some ideas about how to set up and photograph your own still life arrangement. Whether you go for a layout rich in symbolic meaning or one that is simply beautiful to look at, the effort it takes to plan the photograph is worth the beautiful painting that comes from it.