Painter Patrick Kramer knows how hard it is to translate an artistic vision to canvas. Often, he wasn’t satisfied with the work he has done and would scrape it to try again. Kramer figured this also happened to famous painters throughout history and decided to see how it would look like if they scraped some of their most iconic works.
Kramer re-creates iconic classical paintings like Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, Grant Wood’s American Gothic, and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring as their creators decided to discard them. The artworks are depicted in the process of having the paint scraped off of them, which intends to show artists’ struggles with perfection.
“The idea for the series started out last year for a group show with the idea of perfectionism,” – Kramer told My Modern Met. “I thought it would be interesting to create an illusionistic piece of a destroyed painting, scraped away by its unsatisfied creator. I could relate to this, as I have destroyed my own share of paintings.”
Check out some of Kramer’s recreations below.
