Put a Sponge on It

An Instagram follower suggested I do more 'Name That Painting' doll recreations, after my Wyeth recreation yesterday. (I just put girlette photos on my IG--mostly I keep my account so I can chat with Fiona about dolls and toys.)

The Top Twenty famous paintings [one of many compilations] would be easy to do--most of them. They're so recognizable, having been turned into phone covers and fridge magnets, shower curtains and umbrellas. (A dress of Guernica? It's on Zippy, via Michael.)
Add one iconic element, and the whole thing snaps into place.
An upright pitch fork in a doll's hand, and you've got American Gothic.
So, it'd be doable and fun.

I immediately thought of Girl with a Pearl Earring--she already even looks like a girlette. The trick there would be the dramatic lighting--it'd be great practice for me. I never studied photography at all, but with our phones, it's not too hard to practice getting better.

The trick to yesterday's recreation of Christina's World was solved by the frightening, months-long drought here:
the blades of grass on the neighbor's doll-sized hill were so bone-dry they looked like Wyeth's crisply articulated ground cover.

I was surprised that several people told me they love this painting.
Why?
AW's painting style is always compelling, but this painting is too disturbing for me:
Christina's arms are skeletal, her fingers curled into the ground, as if trying to pull her heavy, inert bottom-half out of the wild prairie into the mowed lawn.
Reminds me of Walking Dead zombies.*

Richard Meryman wrote, in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life:

"Wyeth is really a dark painter -- of disturbing subjects, of mordant things, of madness.
And he's a painter of courage and survival and dignity. The survival and dignity of misunderstood people -- hidden-away, misunderstood people."

Yeah, well, I see enough of those brave, misunderstood people (and they are brave!)--I don't need them on my wall.

I'd like to get better at photography, but I'm not interested in exact, technical recreations of artworks.
I love best when people use raw objects to hand. It was a thing during Covid, remember--"People Stuck at Home Recreating Artworks".

The kitchen sponge, here, to be a fuffle ^ on a headpiece--that's my favorite kind of genius.

I wonder if people have been changed by Covid stay-at-home time...
What do you think?

I can't see it myself, but I'm probably not at the right vantage point to see any such thing, if it's there. So many people I know were already stay-at-home makers of things, or retired, or didn't stop working during Covid anyway...
(And, we're not isolating anymore, but Covid is still here and has been incorporated into our normal dangers, like automobiles, etc.)

The bigger eruption in my life, anyway, and in the lives of people around me was the murder of George Floyd, being so immediate and up-close.

And now, off to work... Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

_________

* Oh--this explains it:
In Wyeth's painting, Christina is indeed pulling herself along with her arms--she had polio, probably, as a child.
(How would the viewer know this? Does it matter?)

"Wyeth’s neighbor Anna Christina Olson inspired the composition.... As a young girl, Olson developed a degenerative muscle condition—possibly polio—that left her unable to walk. She refused to use a wheelchair, preferring to crawl, as depicted here, using her arms to drag her lower body along.

“The challenge to me,” Wyeth explained, “was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
--from MOMA