Still Life with Silver Bowl & White Cup

Still Life with Silver Bowl & White Cup
Jeanette Pasin Sloan

Artist Biography
Acquisition Number: 78.7
Medium: Acrylic on board
Size: 36" x 43"
Date: 1977
Credit: Purchased by the Canton Museum of Art

Pasin Sloan uses a photo-realistic style to depict reflective objects set against patterned backgrounds. As a young mother in the 1970s with two small children, she would paint in her kitchen, after her children went to sleep. She embarked upon a painting project with the goal of painting every object in her kitchen. It was during one of these nighttime paint sessions that her work took a significant turn when she noticed a reflection in a toaster that she was painting. Today, she is known for painstakingly depicting the reflections on kitchenware. Pasin Sloan works from both her photos and the actual still life, and occasionally the artist and her tripod make an appearance in the reflections in her paintings. The artist described it as such: “Reflective objects tell us we are there but open up a world beyond us. And what is that world? It is clear, yet unclear. I try in my work to show what is real, but to also give the sense that what we do not know is often unsettling.”