The Art of the Copyist

Lovely short video about artist Jas Knight, who is a participant in the Met Museum’s Copyist Program:

The Copyist Program offers time and space for artists to develop their own interpretation of an artwork through intimate study in the Museum’s galleries. Copyists have created reinterpretations of original artworks in The Met collection since 1872.

Here’s Knight from the video, in which he is copying Diego Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja:

Almost every artist was a copyist up until the 20th century because as a painter you would go through certain exercises to learn how to paint. You haven’t begun to see a painting until you’ve copied it.

And I especially liked this bit:

Velázquez’s brain is on that canvas. So we’re encountering a person’s brain that doesn’t exist anymore when we’re looking at a painting by them. I’m literally interacting with Velázquez.

In a piece about Harold Fisk’s Mississippi meander maps, I wrote about art as a time machine:

It takes some imagination, but standing before a painting by Hilma af Klint, a sculpture by Bernini, or a cave painting in Chauvet, France draws you back in time in a powerful way: you know you’re standing precisely where those artists stood hundreds or even thousands of years ago, laying paint to surface or chisel to stone. Even experiencing art through prints or photographs leads the mind to consider all the cultural, political, technological, and economic things that were happening when the work was produced. Art is a doorway to past worlds.

You can see Knight’s copy of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja and compare it with the original. (via the kid should see this)

• art
• Jas Knight
• Met Museum
• museums
• video