Responding using Art 3

As I explained in my previous two posts on the subject, I’ve really been enjoying creating artistic responses as part of the required assignments for my Coursera course in art history. The final one was based around Velazquez’s work, Las Meninas, which you can see here. It’s a complicated work, featuring a circuit of gazes, and it’s a challenging form of self portrait as Velazquez himself works himself into the painting.

Our task was to make a work, or series of works, using whichever media we chose, that took its inspiration from Las Meninas. It was a pretty open brief, with some options being to take part and reassemble selected elements of the painting, or use a theme of the painting as a starting point. We had to consider the difference between making a “copy” of the original, “appropriating” the original (as a creative strategy) and working “off” the original.

This is what I came up with, and this is my explanation;

Two of the key themes of the Velazquez painting are the gaze or look, and the represented image. Here I have taken a panoramic photograph in an art gallery, with the hung images standing in for Velazquez’s work hung in the background of Las Meninas, with the archways into further rooms adding both dimensional depth, and a further reference to the Velazquez painting. In addition, the nature of a panorama requires a fixed viewpoint in space, a point of view around which the gaze rotates, referencing the nature of the look within art. I chose this viewpoint myself, equating myself with the painter who looks out of Las Meninas at the viewer.

What do you think?