The artwork I chose is a simple still life pastel drawing by Alain J Picard. He is an American figurative, landscape, and portrait painter and writer.
In his paintings, especially portraits and still lifes, the backgrounds are blurred, and focusing on the use of light and the depiction of the subject itself. In this lemon pastel drawing, he uses contrasting colors to accentuate the coldness and calmness of the subject. I was curious about his use of color and the placement of subjects, so I decided to recreate this painting with photography.
In terms of color, I replaced the opposite color with a similar color to challenge the atmosphere. I chose red, which is similar to orange, as the background of the main object. Compared with the deserted blue, it has a warm and public atmosphere. At the same time, because of the reflective elements, I expanded the scope of the red background cloth as much as possible in the layout of the scene and catered to the camera’s perspective. In terms of scene arrangement, it is interesting that only two of the lemons in the painting have reflections, and the farthest one does not. Due to the edgeless nature of the background, it is difficult to speculate on what plane an object is placed on. So after experimenting with different sizes of mirrors and subject placement, I got the result I have now.
The reason for challenging this painting is that in this assignment, I wanted to go back to the most primitive and natural photography techniques and play with the most basic elements: light, layout and color. At the same time, I challenge myself to delve into the truth behind the blurring of the paintings.
a journey that wasn't 