Honey Jar

John, thanks for the overflowing kind words. This hangs in our dining room, and almost never fails to make me hungry. It's quite large and fills the wall space perfectly over a linen hutch.

This is yet another example though of how a photograph can manipulate me, the artist. This is actually the way the photo looked as far as all of the foreground elements that are in focus. However, I noticed how large the honey dipper is as compared with the jar, and how out of proportion it seems, like I made the dipper larger on purpose to show it off or something. But in reality, that's exactly what the photograph looked like. So I'd have to say it's a small jar then. I mean look at the size of the clover. If you know how small those are, then it comes in to focus how this jar could be that size. And yes, I was very tempted to put a thumb and fingers holding the dipper's handle, but thought better of it.

Radiating a pronounced tonal warmth, Steven Curtis’s Honey Jar is a deceptively figurative and metaphorically rich painting. The work is reminiscent of what draws me to film photographs over their digital counterparts and incandescent light over L.E.D.: the generosity and warmth of color. Honey Jar is like a candle. It rejects austerity with natural and sumptuous oranges and reds that act on the eyes like a magnet to metal. The softness and depth of the oil paint are so acute that its optical power transcends reality to the degree that my experience of the picture is more akin to the way my mind processes abstraction than figuration. Part of this is undoubtedly the result of the beautifully mixed and enigmatically abstract background, but also the surrealist appearance of the honey spoon suspended above the jar (obviously implying a human presence while simultaneously removing the composition from the limiting scope of quotidian action). I’m not sure what I like more: the beauty and opulence of the work’s forms and color or the mental gymnastics spurred by the dichotomy of abstraction and figuration.