(Top) Robert Fowler The Birth of Venus (Middle) Anthony Canova The Three Graces (Bottom) Francois Boucher Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas

I'm looking for a Venus/Muse type figure to use as a statue in a small still life painting. I find the tackiness of Fowler's image somehow amusing - but would the result be too subtly ironic therefore complicit with the tackiness? Boucher's colours are great! I want to exploit those candy pinks and powder blues that seem to be a great visual shorthand for that kind of saccharin C18th Romanticism and chocolate-boxey painting in general. Perhaps my aspirations for painting are developing a softer edge? It may be that Poussin had unwittingly prepared the ground for that - both in my interest and in general.

There's a thin line between high and low here - it could all easily slip over in some sort of awful Boris Vallejo rock album cover world like this:

Totemic Arcadians

Nicolas Poussin: A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term 1632-3 (detail)

Poussin's Arcadian paintings seem good examples of the sort of stone memorials I've been thinking about - the stone being a visual shorthand for the 17th Century cult of nostalgic classicism cf. The Arcadian Shepherds etc.

This term of Bacchus looks on, begarlanded, and challenges us to disapprove of the revels taking place before him. I am fascinated by such stone faces - challenging, authoritative, sphinx-like, inscrutable - totemic even. They bear a fellowship with the more prosaic example of lion's head door knocker such as I have painted previously:

Thomas Helyar-Cardwell Portent 24x24" oil on canvas 2009

The totem is a guardian, a prophet even. A symbol holder who also embodies the symbol it contains. These devices lurk throughout the history of genre and still life painting, picked up on later after the mania for African masks arrived at the turn of the C20th...

They suggest rites, festivals, celebration, mourning, philosophising, renewal, foreboding etc. See particularly the masks on the floor of Poussin's scene here:

Nicolas Poussin The Triumph of Pan 1636

The clay vessels and garlands littering the floor are like a scattered still life - the tranquility of which is being trampled by the orgiastic revellers in their outrageous debauch of painting's contemporary narrative.