Spoof #1 ( Polaroid) - From left to right:
Mateusz Fahrenholz - Andy Hewitt -
Norman Beierle - Hester Keijser - Melanie Jordan
The Spoof Series started out as a spontaneous collaboration between five artists, whose dinner table talk about the various roles of the contemporary artists ended up in a hilarious re-enactment of Frans Hals' painting of the regentesses, involving a lot of napkins, strange requisites, a purple landscape painting, muscle-cramped limbs and a Polaroid camera with a self-timer. We joked that we had now firmly established ourselves as agents in the history of art.
However, when comparing the Polaroid with the original image (taken from a book on art history), we noticed a few things in the Frans Hals' painting that were definitely odd. The perspective seemed not quite natural, the arms of the ladies sitting left and right might be a tad bit too long.
Clockwise: Andy Hewitt - Melanie Jordan - Hester Keijser - Norman Beierle
We thought no more of it until we did more sessions of art historical re-enactment. When setting up the scene for a Caravaggio painting with a Christ figure at a table, we noticed that there were serious perspective problems we could not possibly recreate. The Christ figure, when standing up, should have been a giant of three meters high! Caravaggio's painting might look very realistic, but that should be contributed more the naturalistic rendering of the light than to the control of perspective.
Of course, this would have been the moment to contact David Hockney to discuss our findings and compare notes, but history had it something else in mind. David Hockney completed his research without us and published his ground breaking studies on painting techniques of old masters in his book Secret Knowledge. We continued our respective careers as professional artists and left it to Hockney to clear up the strange riddles our Spoof Series had left us with.
