| Coyer's
last series of work was based upon still lifes of flowers. Coyer
had explored other genres; this one is a dangerous subject for a
contemporary artist to handle, for it immediately opens him to charges
of inconsequentiality and pandering to popular tastes. This is not
something new; it has been noted how the academic tradition ranked
still life painting as the lowest form of painting, as the artist
was "merely" copying what he saw before him. Flowers have
also been the traditional subject of the Sunday painter.
Coyer's
floral works, however, are art about art. The subject of the paintings
are not flowers painted from life. Instead, the artist has drawn
on models from seventeenth century Dutch painters to the American
Impressionist Frank Benson. Coyer takes vases and other vessels
from those paintings; the flowers themselves were usually drawn
from photographs of flowers The paintings are a paeon not to nature
but to the artist's recreation of nature in art.
The
works are beautiful, but certainly not in a conventional fashion.
Coyer scrapes away, overpaints, and otherwise alters his first strokes.
Many of the works have the floral container set atop a round table,
whose plane is set on a different perspective than the container's.
In other paintings, the flowers are juxtaposed with Frank Lloyd
Wright's architecture, particularly "Falling Water." That
house was Wright's most famous attempt to have a building situated
harmoniously within its environment. For Coyer, however, the building
has always seemed an ambitious failure; the technology of 1936 was
insufficient to handle the stresses put on the cantilevers by gravity
and the problems of humidity from the stream over which the house
rests. The building is not one with nature, but rather one against
nature. Coyer uses it in the floral works as an emblem of the artist's
impulse to bend nature to his esthetic impulse. The irony here,
of which Coyer is fully aware, is that the "nature" to
which Wright's architecture is here contrasted is not taken directly
from life but is rather Coyer's own interpretation of an earlier
interpretation of nature. |