Girl with a Pearl Earring | What a splash | Polychrome | Based on the work of Johannes Vermeer by Miriam Groenen-Ruis

About "Girl with a Pearl Earring | What a splash | Polychrome | Based on the work of Johannes Vermeer"

by Miriam Groenen-Ruis

About the artwork

The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Vermeer's Girl, who doesn't know her. Tourists flock to the Rijksmuseum to admire her, not knowing that this topper 'lives' in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. In room 15 to be precise.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is by one of the Netherlands' greatest masters of painting, Delft's Johannes Vermeer. His entire oeuvre consists of only about 40 paintings, but most of them are incredibly famous as far afield as the Netherlands.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring is perhaps the most famous. But, who is this girl? No one really knows. After all, the girl is not a portrait, but a tronie. This is what they call a study of an unnamed model, a certain type of face or character. Girl with a Pearl Earring could be seen as the Mona Lisa of the North. It is an exotically dressed girl with an oriental turban and a huge pearl in her ear.

In this abstract portrait, the girl is just a suggestion of what was. Shaped in paint splatters, reduced to a monochrome colour palette of brown tones.

I always like to play around. To play with the old masters and transform them into new masters. To play with various techniques and materials, in this case with digital brushes. Abstraction and realism always go hand in hand with me. Just as light and dark, inspired by the 17th-century chiaroscuro, go hand in hand here. The girl with the pearl earring is an absolute Dutch master, depicted here with a twist.