The Art of the Copyist

The piano on my studio helps me to like decompress in some sense, I guess. Often, it's the way I start the day. Cheap music isn't on the piano because I primarily play by ear. As you start discovering how to pick apart chords and figuring out, why does that dissonance, why do I like that? There's the problem-solving element of it that is euphoric. It's analogous to painting in that sense. It's this thing that's utilizing your senses to hopefully affect a person emotionally. My name is Jazz Knight, and I'm working on a copy of Juan de Perea at the Metropolitan Museum. Almost every artist was a copyist up until the 20th century because as a painter, you would go through certain exercises to learn how to paint. You haven't begun to see a painting until you copied it. Well, you haven't begun to copy a painting until you've seen the painting. There's nothing like being in front of the canvas. You're able to go right up to the original painting and look at it. I've always wanted to copy the Juan de Perea. It's a painting done by Velasquez and his mature style. The opportunity, really, to just have four-hour sessions of concentrated looking at the original painting, that's really what I wanted to get out of painting the Velasquez. There's nothing easy about copying Juan de Perea. There is absolutely nothing easy about doing this copy. Not the least of which was the persistent interruptions by museum visitors, which I didn't necessarily mind, but it just compounded the problem. This is like some sort of obstacle course. Make it happen in spite of all of these circumstances. I've seen so many bad copies of this particular painting, so I'm trying to avoid that. Diego Velasquez is considered one of the great painters of history. He figured out a lot of things that even a lot of artists today are struggling with. If you look at the collar, the indication of the embroidery, it's just a couple flecks of lead white, but it seems to have all of this detail. There's this almost diaphanous quality, this very mollified, soft quality that is pervasive in the painting. The hardest edge is the edge around the iris, the simultaneity of that with this softness. It's like sweet and sour sauce or something, you know, it's like putting a little chocolate with salt on it, you know. It's pulling your taste buds in two different directions. So he's creating certain areas of focus to bring your eye to a particular place. He's forcing us to lock eyes with the eyes of Juan de Perea. Just like in life when you focus your eyes on another person, other elements fall out of focus. He similarly mimics that with the paint. Velasquez's brain is on that canvas. So we're encountering a person's brain that doesn't exist anymore when we're looking at a painting by them. I'm literally interacting with Velasquez. There is some essence of a human being that he seems to have encapsulated in this painting, and that's one of the things that we marvel at when we look at works like that in the museum.