Girl with a pearl earring | Based on the work of Johannes Vermeer by MadameRuiz

The girl with a pearl earring, Vermeer's girl, who doesn't know her. Tourists flock to the Rijksmuseum to admire her, not knowing that this masterpiece 'lives' in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. In room 15 to be exact.

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

The Girl with a Pearl Earring is perhaps the most famous. But who is this girl? Nobody actually knows that. The girl is not a portrait, but a tronie. That's what they call a study of an unnamed model, a certain type of face or character. You could see Girl with a Pearl Earring as the Mona Lisa of the North. It is an exotically dressed girl with an oriental turban and a huge pearl in her ear.

The portrait of the girl is really very crackled, which definitely has its charms because it also exudes something authentic. In this digital edit, her skin is almost back to the way it once was, making her skin youthful again. Her outfit has changed to a more abstract representation, just a suggestion of what was. The colors are roughly equivalent, so the portrait is still sandwiched between the two ocher areas, still drawing our gaze to that beautiful face. And although the girl has no eyebrows or eyelashes, it doesn't look out of place on her. Her lips are slightly open, as if she's casually sitting there or maybe just about to say something.

I always like to play. 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 for me. Just like the light and dark, inspired by the 17th century chiaroscuro, go hand in hand here. The girl with a pearl earring is an absolute Dutch master, depicted here with a twist.