Bertrand Russell's Advice to the Future

In 1959, philosopher Bertrand Russell had two pieces of advice for the future: In intellectual pursuits, pay attention to the facts. In moral matters, consider that love is wise and that hatred is foolish.

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Via Best of YouTube

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean....

I’ve been hearing this a lot: “Dear James, I placed an order for Color and Light a month ago from an online seller. They told me they tried to procure it from other sources, including distributors and bookstores. Unfortunately, they were unable to do so and have cancelled my order."

 
If you are having a hard time getting a copy of Color and Light or Imaginative Realism, here’s why. The demand for both books has been so overwhelming that the supply ran out at the warehouse before the publisher expected.

Never fear: a few days ago, reprints of both books were loaded onto a ship in Hong Kong and they’re now in transit.

Unfortunately it’s the proverbial Slow Boat from China. The publisher told me yesterday that the shipment is expected to arrive at the U.S. distribution warehouse on April 4 (assuming the ship doesn’t get held up by art pirates). So those books won’t make it into your hands for at least a month. If you’re the patient type, don't worry, hang in there.

Alternately, at our little mail order store at The Dinotopia Store we have a good supply of both books, enough to hold out through this month, I hope. If your big online retailer hasn’t already shipped, U.S. customers can cancel their order and get the book directly from us instead. For the month of March, I’ll reward your patience by signing each book and doing an original rainbow sketch in each copy. Limit one of each book per customer, please.

Sorry, I can’t ship overseas due to all the hassles with high shipping costs, currency conversions, customs forms, and losses.  If you are an international customer, may I suggest that you have an American Facebook friend place the order for you in the USA, and then you can arrange to have them send the book to you. People have done that before and they get a book and a friend.
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Previously
Meanwhile, At the Printer
Painted Rainbows Video
Book Trailer Contest
Special Delivery Video (showing how we do our orders)

Eye Highlights

Here’s a fun experiment you can try with a friend. In a dark room, hold a candle about a foot away from your friend’s eye. Position the candle a few inches off to the side of the direction of the gaze, and have your friend look a little to one side, too.


Look at the variety of highlights. And remember: a highlight is a reflection of the light source on a wet or shiny surface.

Several highlights are visible. The brightest one (2) is a reflection of the candle on the outer surface of the cornea. The image is oriented right side up, a miniature image of the candle itself. Just under the main highlight at (2), you can see a little red area. That’s a reflection of the glowing red wax just below the candle flame.

The next brightest highlights, (1) and (4), are reflections off the eye fluid that pools up along the edges of the eyelid. Those highlights are directly across the pupil from each other.

Another faint highlight, (3), is visible to the right of (2). This highlight is a reflection off the back surface of the eye’s lens. If your subject changes the focus from near to far, that highlight will shift very slightly to the left and right as the shape of the lens changes. When the lens accommodates to different focal lengths, it’s mainly the back surface of the lens that changes shape.

There are two very faint intermediate highlights between (2) and (3), but they’re too dim to show up in this photo. One is a highlight off the back of the cornea, and the next would be off the front of the lens. You might see them if you try this yourself.
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Photo by Jeanette (in candlelight @ 800 ASA)
More at Seeing the Light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Color Vision, and Holography, by David S. Falk, p. 149. (Thanks, Roberto)

Painting Workshop Announcement

I’d like to announce that I’ll be teaching a three day painting workshop this summer, from July 1-3 at the Carriage House Art Studios in Newburgh, New York.


The Workshop: “Painting in Colored Light”
We’ll learn how to see, understand, and capture the effects of colored light. This is vital experience for all landscape, portrait, and imaginative artists. If you haven’t painted under strongly colored light, I can guarantee that this experience will revolutionize your work.

Beginning by studying white plaster casts under colored illumination, we’ll learn about additive versus subtractive color and the principles of visual perception. We’ll practice painting the nude figure and the  costumed model under a variety of combinations of colored light sources. I’ll start the morning session with explanations, discussions, and then you’ll work with my guidance in the afternoon. Plus, weather permitting, we’ll do an optional sunset painting expedition.

Media
I encourage you to use oil, which I’ll be using, but other opaque painting media are acceptable, too. I’ll provide a materials list later. The workshop is intended for intermediate and advanced levels. Students should have some experience in both drawing and painting.

The Venue
The workshop location is the Carriage House Art Studio, the spacious and historic studio and home of the noted mural and gallery painter Garin Baker.

There are a few rooms to rent in Garin’s home (Jeanette and I will be staying there, too), nearby B&Bs and hotels. It’s a really congenial setting. We’ll sit around in the evenings looking at art books, sketching, and talking.

The Carriage House Studio will also be offering other workshops by other New York based painters. Announcements of those workshops will come soon.

Sign-up Details
The price for the three-day workshop is $500. Space is limited to 15 participants, so please sign up soon if you want to do it. Spaces will sell out quickly. Please register directly with the Carriage House Art Studios, 478 Union Avenue, New Windsor, NY 12553, 845-562-7802. Email Garin at: gb@carriageart.com.
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Link to official announcement, with links and more info for questions and signup.

Academic Methods, Part 2: Russian Art Academy

There are several different approaches to an academic art education. Yesterday, Michael John Angel of the Angel Academy of Art presented his teaching methods and philosophy.

A somewhat different approach is offered by Professor Sergey Chubirko, who teaches at the Russian Art Academy, which is also in Florence, Italy.

Rather than try to summarize Professor Chubirko’s method myself (I have not visited his school) or to presume to draw comparisons to other academies, I thought it would be helpful just to look at his drawings and to ask him a few questions about the thinking behind his work.

Gurney: Do you draw what you see or what you know?
Chubirko: I try not to copy unconsciously what I see. The most important point about the model for me is that the model must be inspirational; it must provoke my imagination for the creation of an image.

That is why I never start drawing before I see clearly the image, which I would like to show, through the model. Knowledge of anatomy and the laws of form are certainly necessary as they help me to work independently and to render my thoughts freely and quickly.

Such knowledge must be automatic so that it does not distract, does not bound imagination and, at the same time, introduce independence to the hand. This is the automatic skill that provides an artist with freedom and fluency when he works. An artist should only care about “what” to express not about “how” to do it.

Gurney: How does the knowledge of anatomy shape the way you interpret what you see?

 Chubirko: For academic drawing, knowledge of anatomy and the rules of the form need profound studying at the initial stages of art education. Such knowledge should not be ignored as, for instance, knowledge of the alphabet cannot be ignored when one wants to learn to read and write.

When we learn to read and to write we start with A, B, C, after that we put letters into syllables; later we learn how to compose simple sentences, then finally – complex sentences. And, as soon as we have learnt to express ourselves freely in complex sentences, we do not need to go back to the alphabet again. We do not think about letters any longer because they are just tools for a very creative process of reading and writing; for expressing our thoughts and feelings.

Same is in drawing. Knowledge of anatomy and the laws of form is just a tool necessary for an unlimited work of imagination and creation of the artistic images.

 
Gurney: What do you change when you draw?
Chubirko:  Selection in drawing is very important and this is the artist who selects what to show and what not to. Any model always has in itself the essential and the supplementary, secondary things.

The aim of the artist is to see what is really important and to emphasize it. The author’s selection in this case should be convincing for the viewer.  That is why when I am drawing a live model my personal vision as well as the image I would like to create is much more important than a model itself. Every model has its particular features, which, in fact, define artist’s choice of the main and the secondary points.

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I am very grateful to Sergey and Irina Chubirko and Dorian Iten for helping me to learn more.
For more information, check out the following websites:
Russian Academy in Florence
Sergey Chubirko portfolio
Academic Methods, Part 1: Angel Academy
Atelier Stockholm: Sight Size and its Disadvantages
More discussion and examples of Russian Academy & Repin Institute work

Academic Methods, Part 1: John Michael Angel

The teaching methods of the ateliers and academies of the 19th century are undergoing something of a revival around the world. Various teachers have sought to recapture or preserve some of the classic approaches to drawing the figure and composing pictures.


The approach varies from school to school, and the methods are hotly contested among their aficionados. For the next two posts, I thought I would share two different approaches in the words of the teachers themselves.

First is Michael John Angel, whose studio in Florence I visited late last year. In a series of three short videos, he lays out his principles of academic pedagogy:






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Here are a bunch of links if you'd like to learn more:
Direct link to YouTube videos:Part 1: , Part 2:,  Part 3:
Angel Academy of Art
Michael John Angel
Charles Bargue Painting Course (Book from Amazon)
Pietro Annigoni on Wikipedia
Wikipedia on the Atelier Method & Sight-Size Drawing
Off the Coast of Utopia, http://offthecoastofutopia.blogspot.com/ fascinating blog by Martinho Isidro Correia, an instructor at Angel. Note in particular his post on Bouguereau deviating from a pure sight-size method.
Related GurneyJourney posts:
Angel Academy
    Academy of Realist Art, Toronto
    Grand Central Academy, New York

Studies for "Love's Baubles"

Byam Shaw,  (full name: John Byam Liston Shaw, 1872 – 1919) was a British painter known for his scenes of history and mythology. Like many of his Royal Academy contemporaries, he went to great lengths to make studies before he began the final painting.


For example, on one of his masterpieces, "Love's Baubles,"  he went to the trouble to make charcoal drawings of the nude figures beneath the costumes.
 
This makes a big difference for getting the action of the pose right, especially with voluminous costumes.
 


And the hair is not an accident either. Shaw did careful studies to work out the braids and the locks. It all shows in the final painting.
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Painting repro from "Preraphaelite Paintings"
More paintings by Byam Shaw on the same blog collection
Wikipedia on Byam Shaw
Black and white studies from "The Magazine of Art," vol. 22, page 633

Video Game Talk

Don’t you love the way people talk when they’re playing video games?


It’s a cascade of antic surrealism, of dying and coming to life again, of hippo people and apes on go-carts trying to kill you before you can find the magic acorns.

Viewed from the outside, the player is a picture of calm focus and attention. Inside he fights to live another moment and to fly to safety on the wings of rabbit ears.

Juana la Loca

In his painting Juana la Loca, Spanish painter Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (1848-1921) told an epic story worthy of a best-selling novel or a Hollywood movie:


“It is chronicled that Juana, wife of Philip de Borgogne and mother of Charles the Fifth, being distractedly in love with her handsome husband—a reputed flirt—became possessed of a superhuman jealousy which over-balanced her intellect.

“Philip meantime ‘shuffles off the mortal coil,’ and his unhappy Queen Juana, in a frenzy of grief, insists on accompanying the corpse to its last resting place, situated at the furthest extremity of Spain, Granada—then the burial place of the royalties—being five hundred miles from Burgos, where Philip died.

“The route lay through a wild, uninhabited country, utterly impracticable to vehicles of any description, so that the Court, the prelates, nobles, and knights, who made up the funeral procession, had a long trudge, her Majesty leading, behind the coffin.

“The pathetic scene given us by the painter takes place at the close of a bitter December day when three months had already been passed on the road; footsore and perishing from cold, the Court mourners spied the walls of a convent, hailing the prospect of hospitality contained therein with delight.

“The Queen, who felt neither cold nor fatigue, acceded to the request of her people, and the bier was taken into the church of the convent, the Queen in close attendance on her treasure, when suddenly a shriek was heard from the horrified Queen, who screamed ‘Out, out of here this instant!’

“Her majesty had unwittingly come into the camp of the enemy. The inhabitants of the convent were not —as supposed — friars, but nuns.

“The spectral figure of the worn-out queen, in whose gaze, fixed upon the coffin, can be detected the wanderings of a mind shaken by the mad jealousy which still consumes her, the coffin itself, illuminated by the light of a miserable campfire, the smoke of which is utilized by the painter to detach the sombre centre-figure, the well-disposed groups which crouch around, half dead with exhaustion, who had been so ruthlessly deprived of a warm shelter by the unconscious cruelty of an afflicted woman, are all remarkably finely rendered.

“The dawning light which illumines feebly the dreary scene—including the obnoxious convent—all combine to render the painting a drama in all save in theatrical accessories and get-up.”
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Quoted from International Studio, 1901.
Image from Wikipedia: Juana la Loca1877
Wikipedia on Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (teacher of Sorolla)

Bicycle Wheel Anemometer

How to make an spinning sound gadget from cheap stuff you can find around the house.


File it under the category of “Utterly useless eccentric devices for cheerfully driving your neighbor insane.”
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Direct Link to YouTube video