| Ever since I was little, I have been looking intently at paintings, as well as drawing portraits of myself. My love of art in general, and of painting in particular, has been very strong since my earliest childhood. As a result, I started my art education in the painting department of the Amsterdam Rietveld Academy, but during my first year I struggled to find a personal way of expressing myself. Finally, by the end of the year, I decided to switch to photography, as it turned out to suit me better. My interest had always been in depicting people, so portraits were a natural choice. |  |
Carla van de Puttelaar
Ever since I was little, I have been looking intently at paintings, as well as drawing portraits of myself. My love of art in general, and of painting in particular, has been very strong since my earliest childhood. As a result, I started my art education in the painting department of the Amsterdam Rietveld Academy, but during my first year I struggled to find a personal way of expressing myself. Finally, by the end of the year, I decided to switch to photography, as it turned out to suit me better. My interest had always been in depicting people, so portraits were a natural choice. I experimented with different photographic materials and fell in love with Polaroid for its bewitching colors.
I would say that a passion for specific colors developed during the last year of my education, as did my interest in naked parts of the body as a subject. After graduating, I started to focus more on tiny details such as moles or small marks on the skin; together with that porcelain skin color, they show great beauty. It is this beauty, specifically the beauty of women, that I want to show in my work. The small details that make a woman who she is—tiny marks of time or emotion—are often overlooked, considered unimportant, or even worse, retouched away with Photoshop, edited out.
There is a strong connection between my work and painting, especially with the painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. The natural light of Vermeer and Rembrandt is a great inspiration, as is the white porcelain skin in van Eyck’s portraits of women. Cranach and Botticelli painted amazingly beautiful and sensual nudes, and in Caravaggio’s work, you can see that just picking a model is already an art in itself. My passion for all of these painters, I think, is reflected in my own work.
Apart from by those old masters, I am also fascinated by 19th-century photography, which marked the outset of a new era of depicting persons and objects. People, and photographers in particular, still saw the world through the eyes of the painter or draughtsman. Consequently, photos of nudes from this period have a strong and very direct relation to painting. The poses for instance, often very simple and with certain elegance, had been employed by painters for many centuries. Beautiful things like those photos and paintings inspire me in creating my own work, and motivate me time and again to show my viewers the true beauty of women, and to draw their attention specifically to what they tend to take for granted.
