AFTER KLIMT

Look, you just can't read three books in one week about Gustav Klimt and not want to experience the exuberance first hand if you can at all paint or draw. I painted the above oil and mixed media on cardboard* from a photo of Klimt's teenage girlfriend Mizzi Zimmermann and made it late period unfinished Klimt, remembering the key to decorative elements is knowing when to stop. He worked from live models not photos, 

so this is not a copy of anything whatsoever by Klimt.

Mizzi was pregnant with his child when she posed for Klimt's Schubert at the Piano, oil on canvas, 1899, seen far left. This gorgeous work was destroyed in WWII (fortunately Kodachrome had been invented prior to same and we have its image in color.) Below, Klimt's The Bride, unfinished oil on canvas, 1917-18.

*the cardboard in question is a photographic mailing envelope proclaiming "DO NOT BEND" which I left in the composition as a random Marcel Duchamps factor a la the glass broken in transit of his The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even.

Trivia: my better half Mr. Twister's favorite "Klimt" is a cartoon (left, fair use © Lessing Images) by the latter's pal, Austrian illustrator Remegius Geyling, of Klimt pausing from painting on his scaffold to be be served lunch by his nude models, also spoofing the artist's penchent for floating nudes with limbs akimbo (right, study for the now destroyed Medicine mural, oil on gesso on canvas, 1899.)

The Klimt is appealingly wry in the same fashion as the photo, fair use © Julian Wasser, above of author Eve Babitz with Dada artist Duchamps, referenced above.