Spectrum Fantastic Art Live

I'm looking forward to being a guest of Spectrum Fantastic Art Live in Kansas City this April. It's a good place to meet other artists who create imaginative realism.

Met makes high-rez images freely downloadable

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Tuesday that they will now make all 375,000 of their public domain images freely available to the public. You can download the JPEGs and use them however you want, including commercially.

On the website you can zoom into the finest brushstrokes of iconic masterpieces like Madame X by John Singer Sargent, Joan of Arc by Julian Bastien-Lepage, and Juan de Pareja by Diego Velazquez (above).

You can also examine lesser known drawings and watercolors that are rarely exhibited. This pencil study of palms was drawn by William Trost Richards in 1855.

The Met's caption says: "This uncanny study, probably executed at the botanical garden of the Pitti Palace in Florence, anticipates by several years the conservatory and bower compositions that Richards made a specialty after he fell under the sway of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. Richards’s sketchbooks of his first trip abroad, in 1855, are full of broad landscape scenery, architecture and statuary, but at the Pitti Palace he dwelt for several days on palms, banana leaves, philodendron and other tropical species. Their intricate beauty alone may well have stimulated the artist, but his unprecedented taste for such motifs probably arose also from his admiration of the tropical landscape paintings of Frederic Church that he had seen recently in New York."

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Books: New Path: American Preraphaelites

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings
Thanks, Damian

Craig Sketching

This is my nephew Craig. He loves to draw, and on occasion I've had the pleasure of drawing pictures with him. I love the purity and happiness he brings to drawing.



I teach him a few tricks to make his drawings of people and houses more realistic, and he teaches me how to declutter my mind.

Atlantropa

While we're on the subject of weird utopias, let's consider the plan by German Bauhaus architect Herman Sörgel called Atlantropa.



The idea was to drain the Mediterranean by building several huge dams, the principal ones being across the straits of Gibraltar and the Bosporus.

By sealing off the inflow of water, the sea could be gradually lowered by more than 200 meters, opening up land routes from Morocco to Spain and from Tunis to Italy and increasing vast swaths of arable land.



With easy travel between Europe and Africa, a supercontinent would emerge to challenge the rival powers of Pan-Asia and Pan-America. The dams would provide unlimited hydroelectric power.



Unfortunately for Sörgel, the Nazis had no interest in the scheme, though the idea stayed alive for a few more decades. In 1977, Popular Mechanics analyzed the engineering challenges and concluded:

"It would require a dam 18 miles long and up to 1,000 feet deep and 1,500 feet wide at its base. The volcanic Mediterranean seafloor, relieved of all that weight, might react in eruptions and earthquakes, and the sea level everywhere else in the world would rise by three feet." 

Atlantropa in The Futility Closet
Atlantropa on Wikipedia
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King Gillette's Niagara Metropolis

Before perfecting his idea for a safety razor, King Camp Gilette (1855-1932) developed some radical concepts for utopian cities. Chief among them was a giant city called "Metropolis," built on, and powered by, Niagara falls. 

I just learned about this recently, and knew nothing of it when I came up with Waterfall City.

Gilette's Metropolis would consist of a central manufacturing facility owned by the public. The residence areas would be large enough to accommodate sixty million people. Potentially, this city would be the only one necessary for the United States. 

"Under a perfect economical system of production and distribution and a system combining the greatest elements of progress," he said, " there can be only one city on a continent, and possibly only one in the world."

The structures would be arranged like a giant beehive, and uniformity could be alleviated by allowing individual building to vary in color.

Gilette wrote: "The buildings of the city have their foundation in the ground, but the buildings proper rise above the upper platform. The people do not feel conscious of the elevation above the surrounding country; for the platforms, in anticipation of the city's growth, extend out beyond the city proper beyond the range of vision. There is absolutely no way by which dirt or dust can find its way into the city in any appreciable amount. There are no traffic vehicles of any kind in the city except the electric transportation system of the middle chamber and rubber­-tired electrical carriages and bicycles."

Read more about King C. Gillette's Metropolis.

Wikipedia on King Camp Gillette
Book: America's Communal Utopias
Thanks, Patty Kellner

Reflected Light on Snow

The deep rut is lit by a low sun from the left.

Winter Day by Peder Mørk Mønsted (Danish, 1859-1941)

The snow in shadow areas in the foreground takes on the color of the light sources shining into them. Cast shadows on horizontal planes facing upward toward the blue sky are relatively cool or bluish, such as the shadows in the rut or the cast shadows of the stone wall.

Sleigh Ride on a Sunny Winter Day by Peder Mørk Mønsted 

Vertical planes on the shadow side of the rut are relatively warm because they're receiving mostly reflected light. The rounded humps of snow gradually transition from cool in the top planes to warm in the down-facing planes.

Peder Mørk Mønsted on Wikipedia

Ouchi-Spillman Illusion

As you look at this black and white figure, move your head back and forth. 

You may notice that the circle seems to shift independently from the background.

Ouchi-Spillman Illusion, Lothar Spillman

The apparent drifting or jumping in the design mirrors your eye movements and head movements as you peruse it. Scientists propose that: "Slow sliding movements may represent involuntary ocular drifts, while occasional jerks suggest a contribution by microsaccades."

"Ouchi-Spillmann-Vasarely illusion"©Akiyoshi Kitaoka 2014 Via Op Art 11

Here's another variation of the illusion. To get the full effect, try picking up your computer or device and gently shake the display left and right. The sphere or disc in the center separates from the plane of the background and becomes dimensional.

Rotating tilted lines illusion via CR Society

In this variation, the central circle and the ring around seem to shift and shimmer in relation to the background. 

Researchers have noticed that these effects diminishes with age. There's some debate about whether that fall-off is due to weaker eye movements or less robust perceptual abilities within the brain itself. 

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Read more: Aging brings big changes in visual perception

Love gets real

Sending my love to you... (Link to video on FB)

Behind the scenes.....I made the letters out of plaster and cardboard and pushed them up on wires, while a smoke machine sits nearby. The hard part was training the little puff balls to do tricks.

Follow the fun on my Instagram feed.

Why Drawing Matters

In this ad for the Famous Artists Course, Norman Rockwell says, "If you can draw, your future is secure." You notice he didn't say "If you can paint, your future is secure."

Norman Rockwell The Handkerchief, 1940

Many students want to skip ahead to color and brushwork and revel in the juicy fun of painting.

But the foundation of any picture rests on the planning stages.

Dry media such as pencils and charcoal are perfect for exploring compositional decisions. You can draw quick thumbnail sketches, and you can erase elements and move things around. Because of the lack of color, you can easily see the bones of the picture.

In the Famous Artists Course, Norman Rockwell shared a preliminary drawing to show students how his thinking developed in this 1940 illustration. Before arriving at the final design of the old woman in the chair, he had the woman and the girl sitting on a settee with a low table in front of them.

Images courtesy Curtis Publishing and the Famous Artists School.

He says:

"I like the intricate shape of the old settee, particularly the flow and movement of the frame. It could actually act as a sort of an old-fashioned picture frame, holding the two figures in."

But he later had second thoughts. The table is too important, and the settee is too insistent. The active line of the settee's edge was too active, out of keeping with the quiet relationship between the lady and the girl.

Those second thoughts drove him to think the design afresh and to do a new set of drawings.

If Rockwell had those second thoughts after the picture was already committed to paint, it would have been very difficult to make the changes.
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On Amazon you can still get copies of the original instructional binders of Famous Artists Course.
There's a book version of Rockwell's teaching, republished in the '80s called Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture

Giraffes Hum at Night

Giraffes hum at night. Scientists say: "It could be passively produced—like snoring—or produced during a dream-like state—like humans talking or dogs barking in their sleep."

Via Dangerous Minds

(Link to Soundcloud)