Recreating an Art Work: The Cardsharps, Caravaggio, 1595

 In ArtPortfolio class our teacher gave us a few old famous drawings to recreate them. Me and my friends selected  The Cardsharps work painted by Caravaggio in 1595. This recreating an art work actually called ice-braker. This recreating an artwork become popular during quarantine due to coronavirus, people weren't able to go outside and visit museums. 

The Getty museum, based in Los Angeles, has a suggestion: recreate famous works of art using household items.

After this tweet  everyone started to post their works with object in their home. People posted these recreating work posts through twitter and this trend become popular.

Here some examples;

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan van Eyck

Me and My Parrots by Frida Kahhlo

The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough

As I mentioned before Nish, Cloudy and I picked an artwork called The Cardsharps to recreate the photo with the materials that we found in the class. First I would like to talk about the The Cardsharps work, I will give some information about this work.

The Cardsharps, Caravaggio, 1595;

  Caravaggio was born Michelangelo Merisi, on September 29, 1571, in Milan, Italy. When he was five years old, his family moved to the Caravaggio countryside to escape an outbreak of the bubonic plague, though by 1577 Caravaggio lost his father, younger brother, paternal grandparents, and uncle to the disease. His mother died in 1584, just after Caravaggio began an apprenticeship with painter Simone Peterzano. 

The Cardsharps is one of the best works he did, so the Cardsharps work showing us  a card game being played between three players: two cardsharps and a dupe. They are playing a game of primero, an early form of poker. We can see one of them signaling to his partner behind the dupe’s back, while the other player  reaches into his waistband to draw out an extra card. The player behind the dupe's back  fingertips are exposed from his gloves – this made it easier for cardsharps to feel ‘marked’ cards. A stack of coins sits on the table, inevitably to be won by the cardsharps. 

PROCESSES:

We started by collecting the materials that we find in the studio. We tried our best to find the suitable materials for our recreation. 

 

Here is the materials that we sourced for our recreation;

So our materials weren't enough for the original work so we have changed the feathers with leaf and also we have changed the cards into phones. We changed the cards in to phones cause our modern life have changed into just using phones so we think that using phones instead of using cards would be more cool.

Here is the one by one poses we tried before taking the whole photo;

 

Finally, we were ready to take the final photos . We asked for a help for taking photo from our classmate Nishma and she took all of the final photos. We picked the best spot for the background in our studio and here are some pictures;

I chose the best one and edited  to look more better, here is the final recreation;

Recreation of The Cardsharps, Carvaggio, 1595 by Behzat, Cloudy and Nish

Finally we had lot of fun while creating this masterpiece.

REFERENCES:

 Twistedsifter (2020) People stuck at home are recreating famous paintings and it's awesome, TwistedSifter. Available at: https://twistedsifter.com/2020/04/people-stuck-at-home-are-recreating-famous-paintings-and-its-awesome/ (Accessed: April 15, 2023). 

Lloyd, T. (2023) The chaotic life of Caravaggio, Chiaroscuro, and the Cardsharps, Singulart Magazine. Available at: https://www.singulart.com/en/blog/2019/11/26/the-chaotic-life-of-caravaggio-chiaroscuro-and-the-cardsharps/ (Accessed: April 15, 2023).