Remember the Fireball Photographers and our new creative project?
It’s time to share how our experiment of imitating a great 19th century artist went…
John Singer Sargent was an American painter, considered “the leading portrait artist of his generation”. During his career as a society painter, he created roughly 900 oil paintings, as well as numerous watercolours, sketches and coal drawings…
Our challenge was to draw inspiration from his grand portraits and create our own version of it.
And it really was a great challenge.
Luckily, I had the most amazing team supporting me –
model – Abbie Higton
the lovely Shari Knowles taking care of make-up as usual
Clair Swinscoe doing some serious hair-magic
and Lisa Keating lending us a beautiful, hand painted silk corset and the rest of the outfit.
When trying to pick the painting to re-create, I did a lot of research and study John Singer Sargent’s massive body of work… but in the end I decided to just keep it ‘inspired by’ and use small elements from various different images.
I think the closest to the original is this one – a portrait of Mrs Waldorf Astor
I like to think, that my style is classic, with a modern flare, but this project got me to *really* study the posing, down to the small details like hands and expressions… and these are all things I am very conscious and deliberate about anyway in my portrait photography.
I will never stop learning.
I will always stay way too curious to be able to stop playing and experimenting and creating… learning and re-learning and and hopefully end up with something new. …or in this case, something a little bit old.
If you are interested to see the interpretations of this project of other participating Fireball Photographers as well, click here – http://fireballphotographers.com/
