"After Mortelmans"

"After Mortelmans"
12 x 16 oil painting
NFS

For many centuries, artists have studied and copied the masters to build their own skills. In "copying" a masterpiece, you attempt to reverse engineer and figure out ,"how did they do that"? Or maybe more accurately, how can I make marks and use my knowledge of drawing, values, colors and edges to simulate what another artist created.  A caveat is that doing this it that it must be solely for learning purposes. It is not ethical to sell or enter a show with art that is copied from another artist - whether living or not.

Today's learning exercise was to create a painting inspired by this gorgeous painting by Frans Mortelmans, 1865-1936. Although not as well know as some of the other expert floral artists, like Fantin-Latour, Mortelmans did leave an exceptional body of work (including other genres beyond florals as well).

This is one of my favorites of his, so I decided to give it a shot. My aim was not so much to replicate it exactly, stroke for stroke, but to paint it using similar colors, shapes and values so I could get a sense of how he was interpreting the scene before him. In painting from another painting, someone has already taken the 3 dimensional world and translated it into the language of paint, so the hard part has already been done for you, but nevertheless there is value to painting it to understand that interpretation.

Below are the steps I took in creating  my version of Mortlemans' painting.

Rough drawing for placement

Block in the darks

Add background

Add table top, after this, lights placed to complete block in
and then shapes, colors, values, edges refined

 

Mortleman's print on left, my finished painting on right.