In the summer of 2019, my fiancé and I made a quick escape from the driving heat of summer in Phoenix to the beaches of San Diego. That’s where I first met Juan Sanchez Cotàn, painter during the Spanish Baroque and a pioneer of iconographic simplicity in the genre of still life. He lived in Toledo, Spain in the 16th Century and actually left his artistic career in his early 40’s to join a Carthusian monastery. His sense of spiritual depth glows through his work, often deceptively simple compositions of fruit and vegetables, hung from string in a manner that was common at the time to preserve freshness.

In the San Diego Museum of Art’s Spanish Baroque exhibition, I discovered several of his works, most memorably, this beautiful still life of hanging produce. I was drawn to the depths of the black background and the luminosity of the highlights. Each form is scrutinized in such intensity that the picture takes on an almost mystical quality and the arc created from upper left to lower right is perfect in its symmetry. The wooden edge, through which the objects are hung, is intriguing in that its perspective angles are too dramatic to be a real life window. It’s realism that couldn’t actually be realistic. This is all the more amazing if you put him in context. Around that time still life painters of the Dutch Golden Age were painting magnificent and complex arrangements, overspilling with hundreds of overlapping objects.

In studying his work, I found an example of some of the qualities I wanted in my own work; depth, austerity, peace. Despite the counter prevailing tides of the art world as I perceive it. I had been searching for my “style” at the urging of teachers and knew that these qualities represented one puzzle piece of the kind of art I wanted to make.

Writer Austin Kleon wrote a wonderful book about the artist’s life, Steal Like an Artist, in which he affirms the creative person’s need for inspiration. “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running from it.” Meeting Juan on that balmy day in San Diego was a huge leap in helping me articulate my vision as an artist. I encourage you to look for your influences and be ok with embracing them. It was Pablo Picasso, after all, who said “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”