Sharon Ryker Shane Still Life with Coffee Mill, Signed Peanut, 1969

The Painting

A kitchen table laid with four things and nothing else. A clear glass bottle holds oil to about half its depth, its label reduced to a pale rectangle. Beside it stands a box coffee mill, the wooden case warm and plain, its cast iron hopper and long crank painted a flat black that reads almost as silhouette against the wall. To the left a shallow blue gray plate carries a small loaf cut into three thick slices, and in front of it sit two red onions, their papery skins worked up in violet and dusty rose.

The wall behind is a soft wash of green moving to ochre where the light falls, brushed in loose circular strokes with no horizon and no hard edge. The tabletop is a flat band of cream and tan. Nothing is modeled more than it needs to be, and nothing competes. It is a quiet, careful picture of ordinary things, painted by someone who was looking hard at them.

It is signed at the lower right in green block capitals, PEANUT. The painting is set behind a cream linen liner in a dark stained wood frame with a running ribbon carved into the outer molding.

History & Provenance

This painting carries the kind of documentation that almost never survives. The reverse holds the printed label of a Grumbacher Genuine Canvas Panel, number 634, size ten by twenty inches, made in the United States by M. Grumbacher Inc. of New York, and the artist filled in the maker's record block by hand.

It records the artist as Sharon Ryker Shane, with a home address in Las Vegas, Nevada. The place of painting is given simply as Home. The date is written as January 1969. The name of the painting reads In remembrance of Joe E. McCoy, though the hand runs together at the end and the surname is the clearest part of it. The price field has been inked out in heavy black, which is its own small piece of history.

So the front is signed Peanut and the back is signed Sharon Ryker Shane. She painted under a nickname and recorded her legal name on the reverse, which is a habit of painters who worked for their own circle rather than for a market. The title tells you the rest: this was made in memory of someone, at home, in January.

The frame carries the label of Stremmel Galleries Ltd. at 1460 South Virginia Street, Reno. Stremmel was founded in 1969 and still operates in Reno today, a few doors down at 1400 South Virginia. The painting and the gallery are the same age, and the framing was done at the beginning of a Reno institution that has now run for over fifty years.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Small still lifes of kitchen things are the most livable paintings there are. This one is twenty inches wide and a modest ten high, which is exactly the proportion that works above a range hood, along a stair wall, over a doorway or in the narrow space beside a cabinet run where nothing square will fit.

The palette does half the work. Green, cream, warm tan and two notes of violet will sit against painted cabinetry, bare plaster or wallpaper without argument, and the black of the coffee mill gives the eye somewhere to land.

What sets it apart is that you know who made it, where, and why. Most paintings at this scale arrive anonymous. This one arrives with a name, a city, a date in January, a dedication to someone remembered, and a Reno gallery frame from the year that gallery opened. That is a complete object, and complete objects are rare.