End of an Era

I decided to post this image of the Queen today as a tribute, an image which I feel is contemplative and inspiring and which shows her as an ordinary person, transcending her formal role and image, through the simple act of having her eyes closed.

This is a rendition of a very rare portrait of Queen Elizabeth with her eyes closed, an intriguing image by artist Chris Levine seen here in a gallery window in Salcombe last October. The interesting story of how it came to be is described below.

It was a happy ‘accident’ that resulted in Chris Levine’s meditative portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. He had set out on a commission to commemorate the Isle of Jersey’s 800th year of allegiance to the crown in a holographic portrait, a process that involved an extraordinary technological array: a high-resolution digital camera which moved along a rail taking 200 images over eight seconds, a 3-D data scanner and a medium format camera which he could use, if necessary, to capture information he could texture-map onto the 3-D data sets. The queen was required to sit still for 8 seconds at a time, and between the passes she closed her eyes to rest. Levine was struck by the beauty of her meditative state and snapped the shutter. (saatchigallery.com)

'There was a lot of light on Her Majesty so I asked her to rest and close her eyes in between shots and the camera in the middle of the track caught that moment.

'I found it years later on my hard drive. Within 30 seconds I applied a filter and it leapt out at me. It really resonated around the world.' (Dailymail.co.uk)