Venus in Purple

Hello all, I am planning on going through all of my works and slowly blogging about the process behind each one, so I will for the near future be mostly talking about my pieces chronologically backwards. This is my first post and I will be speaking about my latest piece “Venus in Purple”. The idea for this came about when I was reading an art history book and came upon a chapter about the famous painter and famous artist Manet. He made a work called “Olympia” that was initially scorned by most people at the salon where it was shown. What was interesting about it was that “Olympia” was actually modelled after “Venus of Urbino” by Titian (an old master) so it was a bit ironic that the art community was upset by his work. After reading more into it in my Jansen art history book, it is a common and long-lived trend for artists to take motifs and even entire compositions from other artists of the past and improve upon or make them their own. That is when I decided to make my own Venus painting.

The color choice for me was pretty intuitive, I found the lavender to be the most alluring and worked from there. The orange was used to contrast the overwhelming purple of the piece as a whole and I took a lot of care to have both subtle and dramatic changes to the color to simulate depth as that is something I tend to lack in my paintings. I added the candelabra and flower pot where two people were placed in the original composition because I wanted the scene to seem more private than the original “Venus of Urbino”. Overall to me it ended up looking like a more sinister yet intimate version of the venuses prior and that was what I was aiming to achieve.