Hey, welcome back! This is my FINAL blog post on this series, for the moment at least, until I finish up the other recreations I have planned. I'm also releasing my first YouTube video today, it should be up a little later on, and I'll post it on all my social media accounts. From here on, I'm going to be releasing blog posts that correlate to what I'm talking in my video each week, and... yeah! I'm pretty excited about it all!
But anyway, the final recreation I'm going to talk about it called Vanitas by Pieter Claesz, and it's another still life painting.
Claesz was a Dutch painter who lived from 1597 to 1660, through the Dutch Golden Age. Of all the periods of art history, the Dutch Golden Age is one of my favourites (along with the Renaissance [1400s/1500s] and Romanticism [1800s]), because it was really the first time that art moved away from traditional religious iconagraphy towards the capture of everyday life. Also, the still lifes from this period are EXCEPTIONAL. But Claesz isn't a particuarily famous artist, there are many other painters from the Dutch Golden Age who found greater fame than him, but his still life works are perfect examples of still life work during this period of art.
Claesz was also one of many artists during this period who was influenced by the movement called Vanitas. The movement was especially associated with the still life works of this time, and dealt with the Christian view that earthly life and the aquisition of earthly goods and services was somewhat meaningless. One of the most prominent subjcet matter in works pertaining to this movement were skulls, rotten fruit, and watches... anything that depicted the passage of time.
The still life Vanitas, was painted in 1630 and is oil on panel. Today, it's on display at Mauritshuis, in the Hauge, Netherlands.
And here is my recreation of the painting:
So there are some pretty obvious differences between the original and mine. The biggest is the use of candles instead of an inkwell. This was mostly because... it's 2016 and I don't have an inkwell. And I had just bought that candelabra at Value Village and really wanted to incorporate it in a photo. I also changed around some of the objects in the still life, I tried to keep it as close to the original as possible, but it was kind of hard.
However my product photography teacher really loved this one. He loved the cracked overlay (which is in all of the photos, but more prominent in this one) and loved how it looked painterly. While this recreation isn't one of my favourites from the series, I do really love how the effects turned out on this one. Of all of my recreations, the oil paint look, with the cracked, aged overlay turned out the best here. It does feel like an old painting, so I was pretty pleased with that.
And that's it! That's the final recreation I have to talk about (so far). Hopefully in the spring I'll be able to get some good landscape shots and finish up the others.
As always, you can find the entire series here.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you all enjoyed this little blog series!
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And you can check out my debut fantasy novel, The Children of Gods and Monsters, now available on Amazon, here.
Aslo check out the prelude to The Children of Gods and Monsters, aslo available on Amazon, here.
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