Vanitas XI

The Vanitas series continues, originally made on canvases and sculpture, this time Vanitas comes to the digital world.

Since I was a kid I have been very curious about weird still life paintings. To me it was like crime scenes where I had to find out the story behind those compositions.

While most still life paintings are just studies of light and color, there are some special ones that particularly caught my attention: Vanitas, a genre mainly developed in the Baroque that highlight the transience of life, the firmness of death and how we deal with what’s in between. The visual tension of these compositions intrigued me: the skulls, the jewels, the rotten fruits, the lobsters hanging, the fragile balance of the candles and hourglasses reminding us our limited time in life…

I like the challenge and contrast of turning the hidden symbology of these dark elements into a colorful composition with friendly shapes while keeping that balance somehow.