Music: Lesley Gore “You Don’t Own Me”
This was the second portrait I made of Jenna, one of my favorite students. I painted her when she was in fifth grade as “the crying girl,” after one of my favorite Picasso paintings. And she was my student again as a sixth grader so I painted her as “the girl with the pearl earring” after Vermeer.
At this point in my life I wasn’t consciously, or systematically, recreating and reinterpreting works of the masters. But, as a child, it was how I began as an artist (copying masterpieces); and now as a teacher, I was referencing art history more and more often.
I have done two more interpretations of this masterpiece (Vermeer’s, not my own) but this one probably remains my favorite even though it took but a fraction of the time the others did. Maybe it is its immediacy that I love so much or that I associate it with the first years of my teaching career; which were the happiest times in my life.
But let’s see how the rest of my timeline unfolds.
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#painting #portrait #vermeer #retrato #earring