Hollywood Backdrops on CBS News

Hollywood backdrops, or "backings," as they are known in the industry, are some of the biggest and most illusionistic paintings in the world.

They're still used in movies and TV shows when you need a way to place a scene in a faraway place, a time in history, or a different season. When they're not used they're rolled up in giant tubes.

CBS Sunday Morning did a feature on them, interviewing Karen Maness, who wrote the book The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop.



Maness is an atelier-trained painter who teaches at the U.T. Austin's Department of Theatre and Dance. She works as a Scenic Art Supervisor at Texas Performing Arts, and recently co-founded the new Atelier Dojo.

The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop is 324 pages, hardbound, slipcased, with huge photo reproductions that spill across its 11x14" pages.
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Previously: Hollywood Backdrops: Illusion at a Cinematic Scale

Abstract Paintings—by Humans or A.I.?

Here are two groups of abstract paintings divided by a black line. Half of them are made by humans, and the other half are made by a machine-learning algorithm. Can you tell which is which?
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Related Previous Posts:
Abstraction Generator
Is it Cheating to Base My Art on Computer-Generated Images?
The Other Abstract Movement

Casein Contest

I don't usually promote art contests if they cost money to enter, but this one is different.

Casein Painting by Stephen Quiller

The Jack Richeson and Co., the only maker of artist-grade casein, has announced a casein contest with a $5000 cash first prize. The entry fee is $50, but every entrant automatically receives over $100 in retail value of complimentary products.

Casein will be given to every entrant

Everyone who enters gets a nine-color set of paint, two brushes, and paper, and the first 75 registered entrants receive a book from Stephen Quiller.
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Info: Richeson Casein Contest
Registration Deadline May 19: Prospectus Here

Spoonbill Studies

Spoonbill study skins drawn in pencil and watercolor in the back of a natural history museum. 

I did these studies as reference for a painting of Alexander Humboldt on the Orinoco, published in National Geographic .

Optical Illusion: Sloping Blue Stripes

In this optical illusion by Victoria Skye, the blue stripes seem to slope up and down, but they're actually level and parallel. 

On close examination, the little diamond shapes in the top blue stripe tilt a little to the left. They tilt to the right on the second and fourth stripe. Those tilting diamonds seem to influence our perception of the slope of each blue stripe.

Squinting overcomes the illusion because it eliminates those fine grained distractors.
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Visit her website of illusions and impossible objects

Light Temperature

Artificial light is rated according to its color temperature, listed as a Kelvin number (Celsius degrees). 

When you heat up an incandescent filament, it radiates light. At lower temperatures, the filament gives off a more orange or yellow light. As it gets hotter, the color it radiates becomes bluer. 

Comparison of light temperatures via Reddit

When you buy a bulb, it is rated on this scale. In this photograph, a series of bulbs are lined up in a gradation from 1000 K to 10,000 K. Although the scale was created based on incandescent light, it is used for LED and fluorescent light as well.

A candle flame is about 1900 K. Bulbs that produce light at 2-3,000 K are often called "warm white" in the industry. White, neutral sunlight is rated at 5,000 or 5,600 K. Studio north light is closer to 6500 K and above that, the pure blue sky can go all the way up to 10,000 K.

This scale can be confusing or counterintuitive for artists, because the bluish paint colors that we call "cool" are associated with the light that is emitted at higher temperatures, while "warm" colored light comes from cooler sources.

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Reddit: Comparison of light temperatures

Wikipedia: Color Temperature

Is an Innocent Eye Possible?

In his defense of Turner, critic John Ruskin wrote that "the whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, — as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.”

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise, c.1845, Tate

Is such an "innocent eye" really a state of vision that we can recover? Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, in his book The Age of Insight, explains that the 'innocent eye' is not possible: "All visual perception is based on classifying concepts and interpreting visual information. One cannot perceive that which one cannot classify."

Visual perception scientist Leon Lou says: "The innocent eye, or seeing ‘what the eye sees’ is a meaningful expression many artists use to capture their experience in observational drawing and painting. However, a literal interpretation of the innocent eye does not comport with a science of vision focused on object perception. Nor is a two-step model involving a ‘bottom-up strategy’ a plausible account of the notion."

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Read more:

Leon Lou: "Artists’ Innocent Eye as Extended Proximal Mode of Vision"
Book: The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
Gombrich's 1960 book Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Bollingen) also discusses this topic.

Watercolors of Myles Birket Foster

Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899) painted watercolors of rural England.

Myles Birket Foster, Children Reading Beside a Country Lane, watercolor

This one shows children reading a book beside a country lane. Foster didn't hire professional models, but instead enlisted his own kids or people in his neighborhood to pose.

Illustration by Myles Birket Foster for "The Complete
Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow"

He started out by learning wood engraving, and he worked for many years as an illustrator for the Illustrated London News. 

The experience with wood engraving influenced how he painted. A 1906 book about him said:

His approach to watercolor "was very dissimilar to the 'wash' methods of the early school of watercolour painters. Birket Foster, indeed, worked with his brush as dry as it well could be, and probably no artist in using the medium of watercolours ever used so little water. Of course all painting may be said to be drawing with a brush, but Birket Foster’s was practically drawing to a peculiar degree, not washing with a brush."

Photograph of Myles Birket Foster

"He used a very fine brush with very little paint in it, and owing to his habit of frequently putting it between his lips to make the point of it as fine as possible, it used to be said that the paint came out of the artist’s head."

"He usually used thick solid cardboards to work on those which were called Chalon-boards, after; the once popular artist J. Chalon, were very convenient to pack when travelling, or to carry in a sketching bag, and there was no anxiety in straining paper.
"Birket Foster worked very rapidly in his own way of obtaining the effects he desired, and his remarkable gift for composition enabled him to people his scenes with wonderful facility and felicity."

Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899)

Critics considered him old fashioned even in his own time, but regular people and collectors loved his paintings.

"With regard to the vexed question of body-colour—that old artistic tilting arena—Birket Foster was too good a free lance to hold other than broad and liberal views. Although a “purist” in the use of transparent colour, he could yet admit, under any necessity, the useful means of recovering the paper without injuriously soaking and rubbing and sponging the surface into roughness. But he used bodycolour, when at all, very sparingly....at all events in art, the end justifies the means."

Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899)

Friends said he always had a sketchbook in his pocket, and he created studies in tone before commencing his full watercolor compositions.

Martin Hardie says on the Victorian Web website:

"Unfinished work by him shows that he made a careful pencil drawing, often covered parts of it with transparent colour, and then applied patches of Chinese White, over which he worked with stipple or hatched strokes of pure colour. His method was much the same as that of Hunt and [John Frederick] Lewis. All of them could finish their work piece by piece, making and mending as they carried it to completion. His body-colour mixture of white made the blue of his skies sufficiently tacky for the hair strokes of his brush to show quite clearly."

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Myles Birket Foster on Wikipedia

Behind the Scenes at the Met Museum, 1928

The Metropolitan Museum made this silent film in 1928 showing the work that the museum staff did behind the scenes (Link to YouTube)

The labels on each painting were hand lettered with a brush. There are scenes showing how a manikin was fitted with armor and how salt-encrusted Egyptian statues were soaked to keep them from disintegrating.

Lettering the museum labels

Although the video moves a bit slowly, it's fascinating to see how things like type setting and exhibition design were done before the digital revolution.
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Behind the Scenes: The Working Side of the Museum, 1928 | From the Vaults

Facial Recognition Tech Used for Animals, Too

Scientists studying chimpanzees or lions once used scrapbooks of photos to help recognize and memorize the faces of individuals.

Now, the same kind of facial recognition technology that has been used with humans is being used to identify and track animals in the wild. The technology was applied successfully to hours of video footage of a chimpanzee troop. The system was 92 percent accurate at identifying particular individuals. Humans were only 42 percent accurate at the same task.

Facial recognition systems are also being used for identifying cows, sheep, pigs, and other farm animals. The technology also tracks the health records of each animal to update their feeding, exercise and medication needs.

Conceivably such a system could be used to identify individual songbirds at your bird feeder or pigeons in the park. It could randomly give them names, and tell you the backstory of their migratory and mating histories. How would that change our view of animals in the wild?
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New York Times: China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces
VOA: Facial Recognition Now Used to Identify and Follow Animals