DURHL DAVIS

The Baker's Table

Oil on Artefex Oleopanel · 8 × 10 inches · 2024

A humble still life in the kitchen tradition — a well-used flour sifter and a single apple, resting on a worn worktable. Painted in the classical Flemish manner — umber ground, grisaille underpainting, dead layer, and translucent glazes built fat-over-lean — The Baker's Table draws not from the laden pronk tables of Heda and Kalf, but from the quieter domestic pieces of Pieter Claesz and Adriaen Coorte, where the dignity of common things is given the same reverence afforded silver and crystal.

Every passage was painted from life, in natural north light. The work honors the soft sheen of tin worn by use, the muted blush of an ordinary apple, the long shadow of an unhurried afternoon.

 

Every passage was painted from life, in natural north light. The work honors the soft sheen of tin worn by use, the muted blush of an ordinary apple, the long shadow of an unhurried afternoon. The painting is housed in a hand-scraped Dutch ripple frame by Tom Matthews of Ripple Molding — the 17th-century technique paired with the 17th-century tradition.

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