All the incredible feats of illusion achieved by the greatest of painters throughout history are ultimately just paint applied by paintbrushes. These tools, which are essential to the portrait painting process, are eventually discarded while the works that they helped to create are carefully preserved and displayed, so it makes a whimsical kind of sense that artist Rebecca Szeto turns paintbrushes into portraits of people from historic paintings in an amusing series called “Paintbrush Portraits.”
These works play with notions of re-forming beauty and value. I use humble, end-of-life, mass-produced materials inspired by my experience as a faux finisher. The paintbrush is self-referential, acting as both subject and object. It refers to the history of painting, through the medium of paint, with its own tool.
I love the idea of commemorating the tools we use to make art by turning them into works of art themselves!
[via Junk Culture]
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