MY FAVOURITE THINGS - AN ONGOING SERIES

I’ve been a fan of Erika Olson’s art for a long time. If you don’t know her work, your life is going to be enriched, I’m convinced, by adding her Instagram page - erikolsonstudios - to your bookmarks. Very few of her paintings, though, look like this one. Erika creates still lifes, often in chalk pastel, with unusual arrangements. There are madcap tablecloths laid beneath tropical flowers and waxy succulents, Mediterranean vases and thick-skinned fruit, intense zigzagging wallpapers behind oily sardines and over-iced cakes. There is a tremendous busyness on show. Her art teems with life.

Some of the tabletops she creates are set before sketched landscapes that feel to me archetypal, like countries I vaguely remember, many of them beset by dawn fog. These are some of my favourites. Regarding the work, you can’t help but feel as if you yourself might suddenly emerge from one of the forests, or appear traipsing along one of the steep river banks, and then watch yourself coming to terms with the artist’s work, much as you’re doing here, now.

Ribs, the piece above, is atypical. There is so little flesh elsewhere in her work. And the meat here is so very vivid, a nearly hallucinogenic mix of fat and blood. It is violent, Shakespearan, it is Lear’s misshapen crown. But there is another way of looking at it that picks up on a buzzy sort of calm. It is the reflective aftermath of a battle, the world gone very quiet. The surface this roast sits on is suggested with a bewildering set of fleshtones - as if the butchered meat is set atop a man’s face. The whole work could be a riff on a still from a Peter Greenaway film, or a panel from a Francis Bacon, only Olson’s work is less cruel, and more still, than Bacon’s.

Ribs is on the wall in my office now. I can’t imagine it ever leaving. Consider yourself invited to stop by for a real good look.