EMPS: Art Conspired

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #122: Art Inspired, Carly wanted us to take a photo based on or inspired by a particular piece of art work. My schedule being what it is these days, I decided not to even attempt to do the assignment as written, creating new photos in camera that remind one of the painting or sculpture or whatever. That would be way too ambitious for me, probably beyond my skill to even do. So I did the next best thing. I took existing photos from my archives, plus one new one, and edited them into four iconic pieces of art. Here they are:

This first one is based on Chinese Girl (1950) by Vladimir Tretchikoff. I started with an existing photo of the vintage print hanging in our den, and a self-portrait photo I took last night. Basically I pasted in part of my face - trust me, you don't want to see my actual neck and chin- and built up layers of color to try to reproduce the tint. It's not completely successful, but it's interesting!

Next I went with the obvious choice:

The original photo of my face is from 2005 or so. I was surprised that when I finally matched up the size of the face to that of Leonardo's model, I was floating a bit above the torso. Plus Mona Lisa's nose ends higher on the face.

Lest it all be about my face, I next worked the trees in front of our house into Van Gogh's Cypresses:

I had to paste each of the trees in several times over and a bush about three times to fill up the picture, but I like the result. It's less nightmarish than the original, which scared me as a child.

Last, I finished the transition from serene to scream, with The Scream by Edvard Munch:

The tricky part was reshaping my face, again from quite an old photo. The sunset is from January, and the water is from two photos of the main duck pond at Reid Park.

Fun stuff!

Karen