I’ve done a few exercises for my course ( I’m doing online (see Animalyse This; Accordion to Plan; Visual Diary; Diving In), and this is the next, which is to choose a famous painting and then recreate it repeatedly in different ways, playing with different ideas, media, textures, surfaces, etc.

The painting I have chosen is Rosetti’s Venus Verticordia, depicting the Roman goddess of love as a beautiful, dangerous, slightly androgynous, inscrutable, exotic and erotic larger than life woman.

I really struggled with this task. The idea is to lose your fear of the page, that it doesn’t matter what you do. But the more I tried the worse I felt I got, so I’m not sure I ever got over the fear of the page. Ah well, I may try again with another painting, see if it helps.

Here’s the original that they’re all based off:

I feel like this was not a task I excelled at. I was supposed to drop all my fears and just enjoy playing with these different techniques, but the problem is that the more I did, the worse they got, and the more miserable I felt about trying to draw without fear!

Maybe I just didn’t push through the task enough. It seems like torture but maybe I should keep doing more. Don’t worry, I probably won’t share them.