Nacreous Cloud

Laurent Alquier, a connoisseur of unusual atmospheric phenomena, sent me this photo from his collection, with the following comment:

This is a case of Nacreous Cloud, horizontal rainbow diffused throughout a cloud layer. Apparently, these can be seen in northern countries closer to the pole.

More on nacreous or polar stratospheric clouds, link.
This photo is from the website Dark Roasted Blend, link

Spherical Panoramas

If you’re a visual person, and you haven’t yet experienced a spherical panorama, you’re in for a treat. It's also called Quicktime VR or QTVR.

A spherical panorama is a photographic representation of the full 360-degree field of vision. Using a special camera apparatus and a photo-stitching technique, an array of photos taken from a single point of observation are seamlessly mapped across the surface of a sphere or cube surrounding the viewer.


The photo above is really just a flattened cylindrical panorama, because it's just as hard to convey a spherical panorama in one illustration as it is to show a map of the globe on a flat piece of paper.

Using a special plugin from QuickTime (resident on a Mac, and downloadable for other computers), you can control your direction of view, and in some cases, you can zoom closer to any given region of the picture.
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A good place to start is the website “spherical panoramas” Link.
You can also find various images on “Fullscreen Quicktime Virtual Reality” Link.
Quicktime site: link.

Sprezzatura

Elvis didn't invent "cool."


“Sprezzatura” is a term coined by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 in The Book of the Courtier. It describes the cool, confident attitude often expressed in the portraiture of the time. The classic example is Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione himself.


Illustrator Shirley Hughes, in her memoir A Life Drawing suggests that discoveries of serious-looking Roman busts during the Renaissance led to a taste for the "devil may care" look in portraiture.

The word is related to the Italian “sprezzante,” meaning contemptuous or scornful, used here in the sense of disdaining effort. The goal is a certain nonchalance or carelessness, as if one’s mastery arrived almost by accident, and certainly not through any struggle.


At various times in history, artists have tried to capture this particular attitude, both in the disposition of their subjects and in their handling of paint. Sargent accomplished it in his portrait of his teacher Carolus Duran.

Rearranging Art Books

Today I rearranged the art books in my home library.



Before this, I had the monographs segregated in separate sections, the way they do in bookstores and libraries. There was one section for illustrators and another for 19th Century European artists and another old masters and another for children’s book artists.

But I had a feeling that all of my artist heroes would have enjoyed each other’s company if they were sitting together in the same pub. So why not put the books together under one alphabetical listing? They're also much easier to find this way.

Now Hals is rubbing shoulders with Homer, Rockwell is sitting next to Sargent, and Shepard is consorting with Sorolla. I wish I could hear what they’re talking to each other about.

The Humdrum Life

Kirsten, an art student in San Francisco, wrote to ask what life is really like as a freelance artist.



Well, Kirsten, not all of my time is spent at the easel. And not much of it is spent in limousines, private jets, or with butlers or masseuses. Here’s a little slice of ordinary life, starting with a slide down the driveway to the post office.



The little package in our mailbox arrived from the “Sweatshop Elves,” who are occasional commentators on this blog. Thanks, Elves!

They have perfected a mysterious culture-jamming craze using origami cranes. The little package contained 26 tiny cranes, which we’ll hide in plain sight during our future travels. Watch for them!

Day for Night Sketching

“Day for night” is moviemaking technique where a night scene is shot during the day. The film image is darkened and tinted with blue to appear as though the scene were shot at night.



It was used so often in B-movies and westerns that it has become known in France as nuit américaine ("American night").

Is it possible to do a daytime drawing that suggests moonlight?

In a previous post, we looked at the depiction of moonlight in terms of color, exploring why moonlight appears blue.

Moonlight has another important quality: simplicity and softness. In limited light, the eyes shift to what is known as scotopic vision, where the photoreceptors in the retina can only perceive simple, large areas of tone, with uncertain boundaries. You can see this for yourself when you try to make out individual twigs or stones on a moonlit night. Only the most generalized shapes in the dark areas are visible, and what details are apparent tend to be in the lightest areas.

You can suggest these qualities even in a daytime drawing by consciously suppressing detail and softening edges in the darker areas. In the drawing of the Williams College Chapel in Williamstown, Massachusetts, I looked at the scene and tried to suppress detail in the shadows, grouping them together into a simple, soft mass.
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Wikipedia “day for night,” link

Movie still courtesy film art website, link.

Transmitting Emotion

There are many ways to define art. Some definitions revolve around concepts of beauty or pleasure or creativity or imitation or individuality.

But one useful definition is based on the principle of the transmission of emotion from one person to another.


Consider the following statements:

“Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.” —Leo Tolstoy

“The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him.” — George Inness

“The person who can communicate his emotions to the souls of others is the artist.” — Alphonse Mucha

“Art must contain a human experience, and, through a personality, skilfully communicate this experience in an understandable language to the greatest number of thinking people for the longest length of time.” — Frank Reilly

There are a few corollaries to this conception of art-making. The artist must truly feel something for art to be possible. Charles Hawthorne said, “If you are not going to get a thrill, how can you give someone else one?”

This definition of art doesn’t concern itself with the formal qualities of the work. It doesn’t matter if the artwork has elegant compositional structure or graceful lines or the Golden Mean; it simply has to evoke in the viewer the emotion that originally drove the creator.

The artist isn’t the only one who matters. The viewer is part of the equation. Art can’t just be an isolated expressive activity that one person does to amuse himself.

The success of art can be measured by the strength of its effect on the audience. What do you say about your favorite movie?: “It made me laugh, it made me cry.”

What kinds of emotions are appropriate for art? Joy? Terror? Wonder? Uneasiness? All are legitimate, though Tolstoy holds in the highest regard the feeling of universal brotherhood.

Tolstoy is interested in authentic emotions. He excludes sarcasm, irony, cynicism, melodrama, and sentimentality, all of which are counterfeit emotions. He also excludes work that is merely technical or intellectual.

The emotion-transmission definition has universal strength because it doesn’t provide any limits on subject matter, technique, or degree of realism. Nor does it even specify the art form. It could apply as much to animation or writing or dancing or music as to painting.

But it has its limitations. The chemistry of emotional infection is very subjective. What moves one person may not move another. Tolstoy hated late Beethoven, Wagner, and opera in general, while most people find them deeply moving.

And the definitions don’t account for work created by hermit-like artists who do authentic work that is never appreciated by an audience. Does an artist have to be conscious of the audience to be effective at transmitting emotion?

This notion of art ruled most of the 18th and 19th centuries until it was swept away by aestheticism and modernism. The image at the top of the post is by Caspar David Friedrich, one of the German romantics.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the definitions of art have been thorougly deconstructed. I believe we need to go back and dust off early ideas that lay behind the great masterpieces we admire from the past, and see if they still work for us today. I’d love to hear what you think.
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Further reading:
One of the best articulations of this aesthetic philosophy was written by Leo Tolstoy in his essay, “What is Art,” (1896) link.
Wikipedia on “What is Art” link.
A recent movement in art, founded on many of these ideas, is called Emotionalism. http://www.emotionalism.org/

The Coppersmith

Merchants in the inner markets of Fes, Morocco get their supplies by donkey, not by truck or motorcycle. The donkeys jostled against me, nearly knocking me over. The smell of the spice and perfume filled the air. Veiled women shyly hid their faces.


After an hour of walking through the labryrinth I came to Seffarine Square. Tiny shopfronts crowded the small opening. A coppersmith named Hamid Aziz hammered a pot.



I sat in the middle of the square on an orange crate and began a watercolor. But I forgot to bring water! Hamid poured some for me into a chipped glass from a silver teapot that he kept beside him.



A few bewildered tourists stopped to watch, but most of the commentary behind me was in Arabic. When I finished the sketch, I showed it to Hamid and his friends.

Arc of Hollows

When drawing the shoulder area of the torso, watch for the “arc of hollows.”


These pits or indentations follow a curving line from the pit of the neck to beneath the clavicle. The line curves along the leading edge of the deltoid and ends in the armpit.


The arc of hollows is marked in yellow on this study of a reference sculpture.


The hollows are marked with X’s here in Michelangelo’s David.

This idea came from Drawing the Head & Figure, by Jack Hamm, 1963, page 70.

Ahead in 2009

On this first day of 2009, I’d like to give you a little preview of some of the upcoming topics.

We’ll take a look at (in no particular order):
Spotlighting
Fibonacci
Day for Night Sketching
The Prix de Rome
The Form Principle
Ecorche Figures
Cast Shadows
The Ebauche
Getting Kids to Pose
Premixing Color
The Pathetic Fallacy
Painting Wet Streets
Spherical Panoramas

Plus visits to new art schools and museum exhibitions.

The goal of this blog is to explore art-related ideas that are completely new to me, along with topics that are review. l’ve always felt that learning about art consists of 10% of new ideas, and 90% relearning the same things I already knew, but in a new light.

I also believe that our experience of art weaves itself into every aspect of our lives, so you can expect offbeat sidelights into contemporary culture and philosophy, or strange new revelations of science.

COMMENTS
The big fun of all this blogging is hearing from you, and I thank you for all the great insights, comments, questions, arguments, and kind words you’ve shared over the last year and a half. Even if I don’t get a chance to acknowledge each of your comments, I’ve learned as much from you as you have from me.

And for those of you who read without posting comments, that’s perfectly OK. I don’t believe in the word “lurking,” and I think it’s fine to read a post and not say anything.

Last night we got hit with a huge batch of Asian spam blog comments. That’s usually the only thing that I’ve ever had to delete. If a lot more spam comes in, I may have to set up the letter recognition step.

ART BY COMMITTEE
Many of you have asked to resume Art By Committee. I had to take a break only because it was getting so popular, and was taking a lot of time and a lot of my megabyte allottment from Google. At some point we can try it again, and we’ll see if it’s manageable. The results of your work are certainly amazing, and I’m always grateful for your effort.

To each of you I send my best wishes for the new art year. May the muse of inspiration be always at your side.