In 1996 I belonged to a small group in Marion, Indiana, the Grant County Art Association. I was painting mostly in acrylic, taking watercolor lessons, and, I admit, not very good yet. The group planned a trip to the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis for the exhibition Stilled Life: The Paintings of Frederik Ebbesen Grue.

The moment I walked in I was stopped. The still lifes and landscapes were stunning. Thirty years later that one artist still shapes how I paint, and I expect he always will.

What held me was not only the almost microscopic attention to detail but the light. Grue could make objects dissolve into dark backgrounds or emerge from them; in his sunsets and sunrises he placed just enough information in the shadowed foreground to make the darkness feel alive. Many of the paintings were small, yet the surfaces were packed with information that larger canvases often lack. I have always wished he had lived long enough for me to meet him and ask how he achieved that dry-brush work.

Those paintings pushed me in two directions at once: to chase even a fraction of his mastery, and to work small.

Why small? A modest surface forces me to decide what matters in the composition and to finish before the first excitement fades. Small paintings are also easier to store and to live with. A writer once called me an “intimist,” and the word still feels right—an art of close looking rather than grand statement.

Why still life? The genre is ancient and timeless; it is a way of noticing what we usually walk past. Fruit, leaves, a chipped cup, the way light slides off a stem—these ordinary things become a story when their imperfections and beauty are the focus. I look at the objects I arrange as if they were actors on a stage and try to imagine the relationships among them. To me this creates a story being told, at least in my own mind, and hopefully it sparks interest in the viewer as well.

I do not paint like Grue. His brushwork and his command of dry brush remain beyond me. But his influence is easy to see in the scale I choose the darkness I allow, and the belief that a few carefully observed things can hold an entire world.

  Here are just a few of Grue's paintings: