Please join me as I make a study of a Vanitas painting by the 17th century Dutch master Pieter Claesz.
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Materials used for my painting:
plywood(9.5 x 14.5"), acrylic gesso, natural and synthetic hair brushes, oil colours(lead white, yellow ochre, hansa yellow deep, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, ivory black), quick drying medium, walnut oil.

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More info on Vanitas art from Wikipedia and the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Vanitas themes were common in medieval funerary art, with most surviving examples in sculpture. By the 15th century, these could be extremely morbid and explicit, reflecting an increased obsession with death and decay also seen in the Ars moriendi, the Danse Macabre, and the overlapping motif of the Memento mori. From the Renaissance such motifs gradually became more indirect and, as the still-life genre became popular, found a home there. Paintings executed in the vanitas style were meant to remind viewers of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. They also provided a moral justification for painting attractive objects .

Claesz was born in Berchem, Belgium, near Antwerp, where he became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in 1620. He moved to Haarlem in 1620, where his son, the landscape painter Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem was born (October 1).[1] He and Willem Claeszoon Heda, who also worked in Haarlem, were the most important exponents of the "ontbijt" or dinner piece. They painted with subdued, virtually monochromatic palettes, the subtle handling of light and texture being the prime means of expression. Claesz generally chose objects of a more homely kind than Heda, although his later work became more colourful and decorative. Claesz's still lifes often suggest allegorical purpose, with skulls serving as reminders of human mortality. The two men founded a distinguished tradition of still life painting in Haarlem. Pieter Claesz was influenced by the artist movement 'Vanitas'.

The subject might be interpreted as one of the many variations on the theme of worldly accomplishments—writing, learning, dabbling in the arts—that ultimately come to nothing: all is vanity. The wisp of smoke in the lamp and the reflections in the glass are signs of fleeting existence common in Dutch paintings. Here the skull is not merely an intrusion into a world of human activity, but the familiar attribute of a scholar or philosopher. For the original owner of a work such as this one, the image probably expressed not only the vanity of knowledge but also the knowledge of vanity, much as a contemporary portrait of a person holding a skull conveyed the sitter's belief in a spiritual life after death.

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