"Removing representation from my paintings wasn't really deliberate, I was just painting.
Katia Bassanini, for instance, painted representations of famous paintings through history, including works by Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian, on acrylic press-on nails that will sell in the gallery for $150 each.
Stażewski reintroduced representation into his paintings in 1934, and he subsequently experimented with various approaches to landscapes and portraits.
But it was a modest affair, described in one newspaper as a "well-designed and pleasing representation of transparent paintings... in front of the theater in John Street".
He urged painters in his academy of painting to depict objects that were "true to colour and form," inviting an extreme literalness of representation; his own paintings of birds and flowers were detailed, accurately coloured, and perfectly composed.
I really loved it, but there was some frustration to not see much black representation in famous paintings," he recalls to The Creators Project over a Skype call.
Moving onto the movie "Van Gogh," he continued, "Maurice Pialat eliminated completely the representations of the paintings in his 1991 film.
The décor also relied on stylized representations of Italian paintings, including Paolo Uccello's "Battle of San Romano," which underscored the opera's military dimension.
This may in turn help explain the enduring mystery of why the oldest of all human representations, the cave paintings of Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet, are expertly rendered as shaded, three-dimensional life drawings, full of persuasive highlight and shadow.
(This is something that, unfortunately, even the most realistic representations of his paintings fail fully to convey, which is why there is no substitute for encountering Van Gogh's paintings in person).
