A Hair, a Grasshopper and Newsprint

These miscellaneous items have all been accidentally embedded in paintings by very famous artists! When varnishing a painting, many painters try to extract every bit of dust or fiber they can find. Even when armed with tweezers and a magnifying glass, this is very hard, to the point of being futile. It’s almost impossible to remove every tiny particle, as they’re drawn inexorably to sticky surfaces. The perfectionist in me wishes to lock my paintings in a vacuum sealed room while they dry, but the fascinating truth is that many of the most renowned paintings in the world today have all kinds of things stuck in them!

The most famous is Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and he’s in good company — Monet, Degas, and old masters like Rembrandt also ended up with airborne debris lodged in their work. If you consider that many paintings are done plein air and that brushes are likely to shed with increasing use, it makes perfect sense. Guess what else is stuck in Van Gogh’s Olive Trees? A small grasshopper! Being smothered by paint does sound worrisome, but fortunately the critter passed away before landing on the canvas.

John Singer Sargent often painted on his travels. He lined his paintings with newspaper for protection and fragments of it can be detected in his Tarragona Terrace and Garden today. You might need an infrared camera to spot them, but still!

Whether due to temperament or time constraints, it seems these famous figures were not overly precious about their work, perhaps valuing speed and momentum instead.

Artifacts actually offer proof of life. In the age of AI, they’re physical evidence of being made by a living human during a certain time period. So here’s to accepting and celebrating these quirks and non-imperfections. Along with visible brushwork, they breath life into paintings to create something truly unique and authentic.