Diamonds are a Girl’s best friend but Swarovski crystals are definitely a temptation that any women would accept. Claire Milner is a Global artist who’s work have been highlighted through amazing celebrities portraits made of true Swarovski crystals. Her latest work: A portrait of Marilyn Monroe for RnB Artist Rihanna.
Claire Milner is a British artist. She started her career as Graphist and freelancer illustrator. From her background, we could feel that color and texture become 2 leitmotivs. So it was quite natural that she decided to leave illustration towards a more multi-sensorial approach of art. She developed an interesting technique with paper collage, mosaic and Swarovski crystal portraits.
After doing different celebrities portraits from Obama, to Amy Winehouse up to Laurel and Hardy, last year her work got to a different level of notoriety thanks to a special order from RnB singer Rihanna. A huge portrait of Marylin Monroe done with 65,000 Swarovski crystals, all glued one by one by hand. Four month of hard and artistic work for a quite surprising result.
After a lot of research on the life of such a beauty icon, Claire Milner succeeded to capture this edgy idea about how glamorous exactly Marilyn’s life was. Behind all the glitters and the spotlights, we could feel a sort of sadness. I was a long and quite hard way to transform the young Norma Jeane Baker to the iconic timeless myth of Marilyn Monroe. Behind the lipstick and blond mask we knew there was something more cruel about it. Her character was basically made by men and during her entire life she needed to live with that. Was she happy at least once? This is a big question and Claire Milner portrait plays on this duality: from glitters and light to darkness.
Someone said that the eyes are windows to the soul. And here all the work between the crystal texture, their colors and the play with light and shadow give an interesting deepness to Marilyn’s eyes. Beautiful, impressive and truly emotional.
From all celebrities portraits, here the artist touches something more intimate, personal and almost truly.
Visit the artist official website and learn more: http://www.claire-milner.co.uk
Simply breath taking.
LA
Info sourced at behance.net, claire-milner.co.uk, and from the Artist emailing. All pictures are copyrighted by their authors.
