Classifying Values

John Singer Sargent admired the way Frans Hals classified his values (the light and dark tones in a painting):

"You must classify the values," Sargent wrote. "If you begin with the middle-tone and work up to the lights and down towards the darks -- so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks -- you avoid false accents.

"That's what Carolus taught me. And Frans Hals. It's hard to find anyone who knew more about oil painting than Frans Hals."

Art By Committe: Cinderella

It’s the 15th of December, and that means it's time for our group sketch game called "Art by Committee." This month it was the Business Card Challenge. Your job was to start with a real business card (taken off a bulletin board 25 years ago) and figure out who it belongs to.

The Cinderella maid service card sparked some creative character studies. What really happened after the fairy tale ended? Scroll down and find out, and be sure to follow the links to the artists' sites to learn more.

Susan Adsett
Blog


Mario Zara
Blog

Robin A.
Website

Andy Wales
Blog, with the full comic story

Mei-Yi Chun
Website

Roberta Baird
Blog

Ian Garrick Mason
Blog

George Semionov
Website

Paul Bozzo
Blog

Jin Lee
Blog

For next month, here's an actual dialog from a science fiction novel manuscript. Your job is to illustrate who is talking and by what means.

Have fun! Please scale your JPG to 400 pixels across and compress it as much as possible. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC. Please let me know in your email the full URL of the link to a larger image or your blog or website so people can see your image at full size and learn more about your other work. Please have your entries in by the 12th of January. I'll post the results January 15.

Change Blindness

Here's proof that most of the time we look but don't see.

Prehistoric Times and Digital Image

Thanks to the readers of Prehistoric Times for voting Imaginative Realism the "Favorite Prehistoric Animal Book of 2009."

Also, I really appreciate the review from Digital Image Magazine, which noted that the book is not just for fantasy artists who use traditional materials.

"There are a few pages devoted to traditional materials and methods, but most of the book contains information any artist, digital or otherwise, will find helpful. Even if you’re not painting fantasy images, you’ll find useful techniques for composition, altering lighting, color schemes, focus, directing the eye, telling a story, and so forth."

Check out Digital Image homepage with a cool feature on using chiaroscuro in portraits.

Note to aspiring and established paleoartists: Prehistoric Times is a great venue for getting your work seen. Information about submitting your artwork here.

Class Notes on a Typewriter

Here's a guy after my own heart.

Antique Doll

One more Rockwell story before I move on…

Many years ago, a frail old woman arrived unannounced at the Norman Rockwell Museum. As her attendant pushed her throughout the galleries in her wheelchair, docents noticed that she was clutching an antique doll.

Then she spoke up, “My name is Rosemary Hunter. I posed for the little girl in ‘Doctor and Doll.’ I have kept the doll for all these years. I would like to give it to the museum.”

Today the doll is one of the many treasures in the collection.

Another item related to “Doctor and Doll” is a photograph which archivist Corry Kanzenberg showed me. Ms. Kanzenberg wanted to correct my earlier post where I said that Rockwell's earliest known reference photo was from 1935. It turns out that the earliest reference photo in the Museum collection is six years earlier. It shows Miss Hunter and her doll posing along with Pop Fredericks in 1929.
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More about the Museum at the NRM site.
Image licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL

“Soda Jerk” Not the Post Cover

Yesterday, Jeanette and I visited the exhibition “Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera,” and we made an interesting discovery that apparently no one has noticed before.

A painting on exhibit, which purports to be the well-known 1953 Post cover “Soda Jerk” is not what it appears to be.

Have a look for yourself. On the left is a photograph of the original painting in the show. It is owned by the Columbus Museum of Art. According to the official Columbus Museum website, it "appeared in the August 22, 1953 issue" of The Saturday Evening Post.” On the right is a photograph of the actual tearsheet.

Notice the differences. In the CMA painting at left, there’s a red leash on the dog that doesn’t appear in the finished work. The CMA version lacks tiles on the floor, the view out the window is much more green, and the juke box is green, rather than brown.

In this closeup, the CMA version (left) lacks the menu behind the napkin holder. Overall, the painting is much looser and sketchier. Pencil lines are clearly visible throughout.

I believe it is an alternate version that Rockwell abandoned for an unknown reason after what he called “the color layin.” (Guptill, 1946, p. 204)


If you compare the signature on the CMA version (above) to the one that appears on the published version (below), note that the x-height, spacing, and baselines of the red signature are far beneath Rockwell’s standard. Rockwell typically didn’t sign his abandoned versions.

It's possible that the signature on the Columbus Museum painting was forged by another hand, though it would take sleuth-work from a conservator to know for sure. There's no doubt in my mind that the rest of the work is authentically painted by Rockwell.

In the Norman Rockwell Album (1961, p. 134) Rockwell mentions that “I painted this cover twice.” But the alternate version he refers to appears to be a third version, which includes a man in the foreground that is missing in both of these.

Apparently, the authentic published original remains unlocated. I hope that more light will be shed on this mystery.
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More about the exhibition at the NRM site.
Image licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL

Scumbling

Scumbling is a painting technique largely overlooked in the contemporary preoccupation with alla prima methods. From an 1842 painting manual:

“By Scumbling is meant, the application of opaque tints very thinly, over parts that have already been painted, and that are sufficiently dry and firm, to undergo the operation; it is usually performed with a hog's hair brush, very sparingly charged with the tint to be employed; which is called a Scumble, and must be generally lighter, though nearly of the same tone of colour, as the part over which it is passed.

"Scumbling may with proper judgment, be used in any part of the picture, but it is better if possible to avoid using it over shadows, more particularly such as are wished to be kept transparent, and to confine its application chiefly to the lighter parts where it may be required.

"Its use is to weaken the force of colours that are too strong, and force themselves too much on the eye, for the preservation of harmonious effect; to give air and distance to objects that seem too near, and to soften and unite such tints on the surface of particular objects, as may be too violently contrasted for breadth of effect.


"A Scumble is generally a tint made of some colour mixed with white; its usual effect is to render the part of the picture where it is employed, somewhat cooler, grayer, and less defined than before; hence it is of great service in connecting any tendency to muddiness or dirtiness of colouring; and also to what is called hardness, or over-distinctness of detail.

"Scumbling, in its effects may be viewed as the opposite of Glazing; and if a picture has been injured by too free a use of the latter, it may, in a great degree be remedied by the former; indeed each is to a great extent, calculated to remedy any errors that may be committed in the use of the other; and their judicious combination in the same picture, is found to produce the greatest possible clearness, brilliancy, transparency and richness of colouring."
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Painting by William Logsdail. St. Martin in the Fields, courtesy Art Renewal Center. Second painting by F. Waugh.
Document courtesy Graydon Parrish. Title: The Guide to Oil Painting, page 41. Kownky, Dillon and Rowney, 51 Rathbone Place.

Frazetta's Son Busted for Trying to Steal His Father's Art

Mark F. of BoingBoing reports:
"Police report that Alfonso Frank Frazetta (above) was caught red handed stealing 90 of his famous father's paintings. They said he and an accomplice had broken into the Frank Frazetta museum in rural Pennsylvania and were loading the paintings, worth $20 million, into a trailer.

Alfonso, 52, told the police his father had instructed him to "enter the museum by any means necessary to move all the paintings to a storage facility." But Frazetta, who is 81 and was in Florida at the time of the alleged theft said he did not give his son permission to remove the paintings from the museum."


Above article on BoingBoing.
More to the story:
Pocono Record: Son arrested, Family Feud, Frazetta's art legacy,
Pike County Press
Daily Telegraph, UK.
BBC News.
Art Knowledge News

Face Detection

Yesterday, when I was photographing that sketch of the security guard, my camera automatically switched over into portrait mode. Its face-detection software responded to the sketch as if it were a real face, even though it was looking at pencil scratches on paper, and the “face” was in profile.

It sent a chill down my spine because I sensed the emergence of a mind.

My camera switches over to portrait-mode whenever it sees a painting or a drawing with a face in it. It stays in AUTO mode otherwise.

According to Popular Mechanics: “a chip inside the camera constantly scans the image in its viewfinder for two eyes, a nose, ears and a chin, making out up to 10 faces at a time before you've hit the shutter.”

I decided to test my camera—it’s a Canon Powershot SX120—to see what it decides to regard as a face.

According to my camera, this is a face.

But this is not a face, even though, as Scott McCloud points out, it seems to fit the ideal human cognitive model.

This portrait of Soutine by Modigliani is a face.

And Jawlensky’s Woman with a Forelock is a face.

Jawlensky’s Medusa is also a face, but my camera wasn’t sure. It switched back and forth from AUTO to PORTRAIT a few times.

There are no faces in Oskar Kokoshka’s Loving Couple with a Cat.

And there’s no face here, either.

Popular Mechanics hints at what’s coming: “Sometime soon, face detection may even give way to facial identification, discerning one subject from another. For instance, the camera could retain an image tagged 'Mom' in its memory. Later, the camera would automatically recognize each subsequent picture of your mother and add the 'Mom' tag to it."

Facial identification or recognition is a fast-growing technology that uses 3-D scans or interpolates various 2-D scans to assemble a knowledge of basic structure. Wikipedia says that some of the new algorithms are “able to outperform human participants in recognizing faces and can uniquely identify identical twins.”

You can extend these forecasts to imagine future web-enabled smart cameras that can recognize makes of cars, Zagat ratings of pizza parlors, and movie preferences of strangers in your local Starbucks.

The lesson that I took away from this little experiment has nothing to do with taste in art. My thought was this: as we endow machines with more and more intelligence, we will have to get used to the idea that they will not respond to basic things as we do. Their talents and their lapses will be unlike ours.
Their thinking style— their fundamental orientation to the universe—will be different. They will see the world in a way that will seem at once chummily familiar and creepily alien.
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Read more about face-detecting cameras at Popular Mechanics. Wikipedia on Face Detection and Facial Recognition tech.
Scott McCloud and the ideal cartoon face on Cognition and Culture.
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Added later: Scott's blog reflects further on intelligent machines here.