Odalisque (after Ingres)

I have always loved Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s painting of the Grande Odalisque that hangs in the Louvre. I actually used it once in an animated film (Roll’em Lola). My goal in this painting was not to recreate Ingres’s original in any way. Instead, by posing a live model in a way that evoked a painting I love enabled me to enter another historical space (the nineteenth century, in this case) and to pull that past moment into my studio. It’s a kind of time travel.

27x52 framed pastel