Every museum store in the world carries postcards of their most popular works. I have dozens of these cards featuring every style of painting imaginable.
In this new series, Visionaries: My Tribute to the Innovators of Fine Art, I explore the artistry of these painters - marrying their iconic images with both abstract backgrounds and ultra-realistic still life objects to create something entirely new.
Composition details
The colors of the original painting were my guide in choosing the abstract background you see here - the dark, intense blue is not a color I normally use for backgrounds and exploring this different palette was a joy.
For the starry sky, I added the tiny stars in the background by spritzing the painted surface with mineral spirits until I was was satisfied with the sky’s appearance. I then enhanced select stars with tiny dots of paint to get the glowing effect.
The fun with the larger foreground stars was placing them “just so” in order to get the strange shapes to the shadows. You can see me working on both the small and large stars in a video I’ve posted on Instagram: When All the Stars Come Out to Play on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BSOpO_Mjm8v/?taken-by=richardhallfineart]