The Frank Lloyd Gallery is pleased to announce an on-line exhibition of still life drawings and paintings drawn from the holdings of the estate of Craig Kauffman. Still life drawing was a regular studio activity for Kauffman, from his days as an artist in the early 1950s. The twelve works in this exhibit demonstrate that he usually chose objects that were close to his personal obsessions: the delicacy of flowers, the refinement of the tea ceremony, and the sensuality of high heel shoes.
Kauffman had success with his first one-person show. When the work, “Teapot with Flowers,” was exhibited at the Landau gallery in 1953, the critic Jules Langsner wrote this review for Art News: “The exhibition splits into two distinct groups: soft, serene, cerebrally-organized abstractions (like the Ode to Crafts series) and the more recent, highly charged linear evolutions on the other. Either way, Kauffman is precociously gifted.”
As his professional career developed in the 1960s, so did his interest in a kind of personal iconography, taken from his obsession with high heel shoes and his knowledge of early modern European art, including surrealist artists. His personal interests in those subjects were augmented by his love of the Japanese tea ceremony, which is represented in his drawings and paintings of tea bowls. Those subjects re-appear in the decades that followed.
Even as Kauffman lived in the Philippines during the last two decades of his life, the format of the still life continued. Bouquets of flowers, tea bowls, and high heel shoes became repeated subjects. In some ways, one might say that his recurring interest in the still life was a sustaining life force, depicted in these still life drawings and paintings.