[ad_1]
Like most great ideas, it came from my wife. She had discovered the Getty Museum Challenge while scrolling through Twitter and concluded it would be a good idea if we were to join in and recreate a work of art using household objects. It sounded like a lot of hard work – not to mention an impossibly high bar, as one genius had recreated Dalí’s The Persitance of Memory using a cardboard box and a laptop – so my first, and indeed second, instinct was to refuse.
But Jill was insistent and said she had found the ideal painting: a portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, of which she had postcards on her study wall. Ideal because the duke looked every bit as gloomy and miserable as me. So she set to work. For her own likeness, she found some old lace she had bought in a French market years ago and turned it into a sleeve and a choker round her neck. For her headdress, she adapted a pair of headphones with tinfoil and paper. She contemplated going to Budgens to buy some Smarties to finish off the jewellery round her ears, but decided it was neither within the spirit of the challenge or the quarantine.
My own transformation was rather more straightforward. First a white T-shirt, whose neckline would peep out above the bright red piece of felt – bought years ago to patch up one of the children’s Christmas stockings – through which she had cut a slit for my head. The big choice was the headwear. Either a dark red saucepan that was far too big or a heavy Le Creuset orange one that fitted rather too well. We agreed the orange worked best.
Once kitted out, we lined ourselves up in profile against the kitchen wall and took photos of each other. Jill had to work hard to get the right expression for the duchess. I had no trouble looking like the grumpy duke. We then WhatsApped the pictures to our son, who turned them into a diptych frame. Job done. And the undoubted highlight of a rather miserable weekend. Now it’s your turn.
[ad_2]
READ SOURCE
