In Praise of Small Objects

I was just thinking, looking at one of the sketches on the forum - Giuseppe Petenzi's Walnuts sketch which you can now see here - that sometimes small objects can be really interesting. They might tell you something about the artist. Sometimes you can sense they were intrigued by its shape, or it might have just been all that was handy. I'm not all that keen on those big, overblown 19th-century Still Life paintings with huge vases and loads of flowers. Far more interesting is a casual collection of objects from the artist's mantlepiece or coffee-table. These things can tell you much more about what matters to someone than pages of biography.
Learn to Draw a Simple Still-Life
Pictured - Abalone Shell Study by Linda Weil