The Tronie's of Crydon OH

About

 Mainly inspired by the new insights of peoples homes and their heads whilst live streaming from the confines of their homes. This pandemic gave us a new zeitgeist in terms of the way we hear, see and interact with each other especially via the news, peoples book shelves, the  mess and the interiors of their homes are broadcast live on TV, as well as social groups and special interest groups via zoom or skype. Suddenly our heads have become public figures and the ways in which we portray ourselves and our ideas are subject to our background image choices when using a video camera and our headshots.  i.e a Tronie. A Dutch term for a face portrait. Funnily enough the artists boyfriend is Dutch and they spend half the year in Amsterdam.

 “ A tronie is a type of work common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression. These works were not intended as portraits but as studies of expression, type, physiognomy or an interesting character such as an old man or woman, a young woman, the soldier, the shepherdess, the Oriental, or a person of a particular race, etc.[1][2]

The main goal of the artists who created Tronie’s was to achieve a lifelike representation of the figures and to show off their illusionistic abilities through the free use of colour, strong light contrasts, or a peculiar colour scheme. Tronie’s conveyed different meanings and values to their viewers. Tronie’s embodied abstract notions such as transience, youth, and old age, but could also function as positive or negative examples of human qualities, such as wisdom, strength, piety, folly, or impulsiveness.[2] These works were very popular in Holland and Flanders and were produced as independent works for the free market.”