Stacey McCraw

Artist Statement: Stacey McCraw
I chose a painting by Raphael that had been assumed to be a copy by
another painter. Last year, it was found by a museum worker doing
inventory and he started to think it was perhaps an original by
Raphael. The article I found on Today claims that art historians will
still have a lot of work to do to make sure that it definitely was
painted by Raphael. I have not been able to find the latest news
unfortunately.
When the project was first presented I looked back at all of my
childhood pictures. Unfortunately my mother made the terrible mistake
of insisting I have ridiculously ugly bangs for my entire childhood.
So I decided to look at painted portraits from the Renaissance because
I have always loved those. I narrowed it down to this portrait and The
Girl with the Pearl Earring. But I thought that I resembled this
painting much more.
In order to recreate the image, I went to a fabric store with the
image and found fabrics that seemed similar to the image. That was
fairly simple but the hard part was figuring out how to do my hair
like her. She must have had a lot longer hair than I do. I ended up
putting my hair in two braids and passing them over at the top. It was
very difficult to hide the pins and hair ties. It was also very
difficult to make the veil look like hers and I didn’t quite achieve
that. The lighting in the portrait is very extreme. It is in a dark
place with a spotlight. In order to achieve this I stood in a corner
of my room with the lights off and then shined one light on myself. My
friend shot the picture for me because he is very good with cameras.
Overall I am very pleased with the photograph although I can
definitely find many differences between it and the portrait. I really
enjoyed this project because I not only tried to replicate how she
looks but I tried to replicate how she did her hair and her facial
expression. This made me think about what kind of person she was.