Hello everyone and happy Sunday! Cate Blanchett is, once again, source of inspiration for another artist.

André Monet’s celebrity portraits may look effortless, but behind every famous face, there are months of research. Once the Montreal-based artist settles on a star, he collects everything he can find: news clippings, maps, sheet music, online excerpts and pages from books (sometimes related to his subject, sometimes not). He arranges them in a collage and then starts painting the portrait.

Cate Blanchett

What’s in it? A page from a typewriter manual; an old French map of the U.S.S.R. and China; a newspaper headline that says “Death passed by above my head.”

Why Cate Blanchett? “This is inspired by the movie Heaven, where you see her head being shaved. When I saw that movie, I thought, ‘I want to capture that image, and the look she had in her eyes.’ When the hair doesn’t get in the way of the graphics and the design, you focus on more important things, like the eyes and the ears. You can’t make any mistakes with the eyes because everything about the person is in their eyes. Meanwhile, on the lower left side, I did make a mistake and I covered it later. The lower left section was boring and I was trying to fix it, so I ended up just throwing some colours on in a rush, and it worked perfectly. Many people have tried to get me to remake this style, and I’ve never been able to. It’s magic that happened one time.”

via Toronto Life