Decembers inspiration will come from........

Vermeer's - The Girl with the Pearl Earring'

as suggested by DT member Lisa Hanrahan
.....and my favourite Artist, hence the ARTastic badge design :)

Added criteria:
1. Single portrait style photo
2. An earring somewhere on the page

Note: Vermeer's painting was actually titled "The Head Of A Girl" (1666) but is
otherwise known from the movie with Colin Firth as "The Girl With The Pearl Earring".

I hope you all enjoy this months painting and I look forward to seeing some really gorgeous entries. Will upload the DT submissions over the next few days so as you can gain lots of inspiration from their beautiful work :)


A little about Vermeer.

Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (baptized on 31 October 1632 as Johannis, and buried in the same city under the name Jan on 16 December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference forcornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.

Recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death; he was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists), and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries. In the 19th century Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Thore Burger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, (although only thirty-five paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Cheers
Shazza