Sargent Images from NGV

The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne has in its collection nine examples of paintings and drawings by John Singer Sargent.

Hospital at Granada (1912) John Singer SARGENT oil on canvas 56.2 × 71.5 cm

One of them shows patients recovering at a hospital in Spain. The scene appears to be painted completely on location, with the artist focusing on each person or grouping in turn.

At the NGV website, you can zoom way into the paintings and see the economy of strokes that Sargent used to describe the forms.

The website also has 64 works by Arthur Streeton, 34 works by Charles Conder, and 77 works by Norman Lindsay, with similar zoomable features.

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NGV Online Collection: John Singer Sargents at the National Gallery of Victoria 

Thanks, Sascha Karschner

Repin in Old Age

"When [Ilya Repin] got old and his hand withering, he should have stopped on health grounds, and his family tried to stop him. They took his paints away, and when they came back from a walk one day and found that the artist dipped a cigarette in an ink well and painted on the wall. So, they gave him his paints back." --"David Jackson Talks About Ilya Repin"

Loopy Reflections

Detail of Sommarnoje by Anders Zorn

In his 1903 book "Light and Water," Montagu Pollock describes reflections that create "a chain of loops or a series of disconnected rings. Such rings are amongst the commonest features of gently moving water in the foreground of a picture. The reflexions of a boom or bowsprit, or of any conspicuous horizontal line, often assume this form."

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Light and Water by Montagu Pollock on Amazon
Digital copy on Archive.org

Loading Lights

Detail of a portrait by Peder Krøyer

The term "loading" is sometimes used to refer to the application of a thick impasto on the light areas of a painting. According to an 1845 painting manual:

"Loading—is a term applied to laying colours in thick masses on the lights, so as to make them project considerably from the surface, with the view of their being strongly illuminated by the light that falls on the picture, and thus mechanically to aid in producing roundness and relief, or in giving a sparkling effect to polished or glittering objects; this artifice however, must be had recourse to sparingly, otherwise it defeats its own object, and gives the execution a coarse and vulgar air."

Arthur Streeton and Art Theories

Julian Ashton remembered that his friend Arthur Streeton (Australian, 1867-1943) didn't want to argue about art theories:

Arthur Streeton 1895 “Sunlight (Cutting on a hot road)” - oil on canvas
(Height: 305 mm; Width: 458 mm; National Gallery of Australia.

"He was cheerful and fond of company, and seemed to be quite uninterested in theories about art, but preoccupied with the task of representing in terms of paint the beauty of the scenes before him. If an argument about art started in the camp, Streeton would make a jest of it, walking up and down and shouting: 'Apples, Oranges and Lemonade.' He joined with [Tom] Roberts and myself in many a fierce bout with the old Art Society in the hope of widening its point of view, but he never lost his temper over them as many of us did. Indeed, it seemed to me that he never felt that theories about art, or the administration of art societies, really mattered. His nature was that of a fresh, breezy, care-free youth who revelled in the beauty of his country, and whose highest ambition was to paint it as faithfully as he could."

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 Book: Australia's Impressionists

Constantin Meunier's Social Realism

Constantin Meunier (Belgian, 1831-1905) wanted to reinterpret classical themes in terms of the modern industrial worker.

Three female miners

Rather than painting a trio timeless goddesses, he pictured a group of women as gritty workers.

Ophelia

Ophelia, the doomed sister of Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet, appears here drowned and washed up on a gray seashore, with the silhouette of a city in the far distance. 

Meunier started as a sculptor, but once he saw the social realism of Gustave Courbet's 1851 painting The Stone Breakers he turned to painting to express social and artistic issues.

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Wikipedia on Constantin Meunier

Turner Watercolor Exhibit

At Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, there's a show of over 90 watercolor paintings by J.M.W. Turner.

According to the Museum:

"The 97 works have been selected from the vast legacy that comprises more than 30,000 works on paper, 300 oil paintings, and 280 sketchbooks, known as the “Turner Bequest,” donated to Great Britain after the artist’s death in 1851 and mostly conserved at Tate Britain. The bequest includes the entire body of works housed in the artist’s personal studio and produced over the years for his “own pleasure,” to cite the words used by the contemporary critic John Ruskin. While Turner is perhaps better known for his oil paintings, he was a lifelong watercolorist and fundamentally shaped what was understood to be possible within the medium during his lifetime and after."



(Video link) "An inveterate traveler, Turner rarely left home without a rolled-up, loose-bound sketchbook, pencils, and a small traveling case of watercolors. These memories of journeys, emotions, and fragments of landscapes seen during his long stays abroad illustrate the development of Turner’s stylistic language focused on experimenting with the expressive potential of light and color."
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Turner: Watercolors from Tate at Mystic Seaport
There's a book to go with the show: Conversations with Turner: The Watercolors
The show will be up through February 23. Admission price is $28.95.

How to Start a Watercolor

How should you start a watercolor? There are many ways, but this time I start loose, knowing I can use gouache to make corrections and paint my white accents.

After a colored pencil lay-in, I lightly establish the local color, then the background tones, and finally I use white gouache to sharpen edges and paint the lighter values.



(Link to Video on YouTube) Here are the watercolor pigments I'm using:
Raw sienna
Lemon yellow
Cadmium red 
Transparent red oxide
Alizarin crimson
Anthraquinone blue
Titanium white (gouache)

Other ways to start a watercolor (YouTube links):
Detailed, transparent only
Urban streetscape with fountain pen
Watercolor and colored pencils

We See Emotional Content First

Richard Amsel, portrait of Merv
Griffin Mike Douglas for TV Guide

When we see something, we don't perceive it all at once. Because of the way the brain is set up for visual processing, we decode an image in stages. What hits us first is the emotional content of the scene, specifically the color impact and the expression of the face.

According to Eric Kandel, the Director of the Center of Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University, "We perceive an object's color as much as 100 milliseconds before its form or motion. This difference in timing is analogous to the fact that we perceive the expression of a face before we perceive its identity. In both cases, our brain processes aspects of the image that relate to emotional perception more rapidly than aspects that relate to form, thus setting the emotional tone for the form—the object or the face—confronting us." (Source: The Age of Insight, page 345)

One hundred milliseconds (or 1/10 of a second) may seem like a trivially short amount of time, but if you're watching a video with fast editing, or if you're flipping through a picture book, that emotional response may dominate your experience.

The book that I quoted from explores the neural mechanisms that we use to perceive the world: how the conscious and unconscious parts of our brains interact in seeing, and how visual information is decoded in stages. He explains how there are separate neural pathways for processing information about different visual properties, such as motion, depth, color, and shape. The book pairs that scientific analysis with an art historian's view of the revolution in painting that was happening in Vienna starting in 1900.


The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

CaptionBot Uses AI to Generate Captions

CaptionBot is a machine-learning algorithm developed by Microsoft which analyzes an image and generates a caption to go with it.

According to CaptionBot: "I think it's a man in a raft on the water."

The labels are generic and certainly not what a human would say. That's a kayak, not a raft.

It says: "I think it's a truck is parked in the grass." rather than a "SportChassis P4XL sport utility vehicle."

Here CaptionBot says: "I think it's a group of men playing a game of basketball." But fans know it's "Lebron James dunking on Jason Terry."

The AI will tell you when it's not sure.  It says: "I am not really confident, but I think it's a building in the rain."

You can try out CaptionBot for free. They say they don't upload or keep the images you give it.