Month: October 2010

Piranesi’s Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination

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CategoriesGallery and Museum Art, Prints and Printmaking

Piranesi's Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination, Giovanni Battista Piranesi
18th Century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi was famous for his elaborate engravings of the fantastic architectural ruins of Rome.

He is even more well known for a set of 14 copper plate etchings titled Carceri (“Prisons”). These are architectural fantasies, “capricious inventions” as they are described on the title page. Their monumental size, grand design and Escher-like defiance of architectural realities are a far cry from the shabby dungeons that were the actual prisons of the day.

Loosely based on stage set designs, they show Piranesi indulging in his fascination with monumental Roman architecture; creating a fanciful series of structures and interiors in which he gets to play with perspective, geometry, scale, lighting and shadow effects.

The Surrealists admired Piranesi’s dreamlike evocations of imaginary spaces, and students of etching have praised his exploration of the medium, using etching needles, burin and burnisher in a variety of ways to achieve his effects.

The Art Gallery of Albeta in Edmonton is hosting an exhibition of images from the Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) series titled Piranesi’s Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination that is on display until November 7, 2010.

There doesn’t seem to be a catalog associated with the exhibit. A book of the etching series, The Prisons / Le Carceri is available from Amazon.

The museum also doesn’t appear to have an online preview of the exhibition. I’ve listed some links and resources for Piranesi below.

The best images of Piranesi’s etchings I’ve found are on the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click on the images for a larger version; you can click through in sequence at either size. There is a zoom button that pops up a new window and allows you to zoom in on parts of the image, albeit in a frustratingly small window. (Note that in addition to impressions from the Prisons series, there are many more works here; there are 6 pages of thumbnails for Piranesi. Wonderful images of grand Roman architecture and more.)

There is also a nice section on Piranesi as part of the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, with a detail page on the Round Tower from Prison series. (See my post on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.)

There is an interesting blog post from Murray Ewing about piranesi’s effect on pop culture and cinema, and for an interesting twist on Piranesi’s series by a contemporary collage artist, see my post on Emily Allchurch.

According to an early biography of Piranesi, he is reported to have said:

“I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.”

[Thanks to ianehunt, @condottiere94 (Twitter page) for the suggestion]

Link: Piranesi's Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination, AGA, to 11/7/10
Piranesi at New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Piranesi on MetMuseum Timeline of Art History
Met detail page on the Round Tower from Prison series
Engravings by Piranesi (many views of Rome, drill down for large versions)
Web Gallery of Art
The Round Tower at the Met
Piraesi at The National Gallery
Artchive (links at bottom of page)
CGFA
Cuidad de la pintura (ES)
ARC
Humanities Web
Museo do Roma
Artcyclopedia (links to other resources)
My previous post about Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Salesman Pete and the Amazing Stone From Outer Space!

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CategoriesAnimation

Salesman Pete and the Amazing Stone From Outer Space, Marc Bouyer, Max Loubaresse and Anthony Vivien
Salesman Pete and the Amazing Stone From Outer Space! is a beautifully designed and wonderfully realized, if somewhat nonsensical, animated short by the team of Marc Bouyer, Max Loubaresse and Anthony Vivien, with music by Cyrille Marchesseau and sound design by Mael Vignaux.

Involving a clumsy but super powered salesman protagonist, a villain with, er,.. appendages, and a stone from outer space that turns whatever it touches into seafood, the animation careens, tilts, bounces, wobbles and rockets through numerous scenes, each beautifully designed, drawn and colored, with a slap dash pace, whiplike motion and artful style that puts many of the current big studio animation efforts to shame.

The film utilizes computer animation, either combined with hand-drawn animation or in the service of CGI models that have been given a hand-drawn look, that overall is remarkably successful and just a visual treat.

There is a blog, partly in French, partly in English, that features preliminary art, model studies, character designs, backgrounds and other aspects of the development of the film.

The official website also has a link to an earlier trailer the group did for a never fully realized short, Meet Buck, that shows them developing the skills exhibited in Salesman Pete. There is also a short trailer for Salesman Pete on Vimeo.

I don’t know what this group is up to next, but I’m looking forward to seeing their next project, whatever it may be.

[Via Neatorama]

Link: Salesman Pete and the Amazing Stone From Outer Space, Vimeo
Official website
http://salesman-pete.blogspot.com, (blog)
Meet Buck trailer

Haltadefinizione, high resolution art images

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CategoriesGallery and Museum Art, High-res Art Images

Botticelli's Birth of Venus, high resolution image from Haltadefinizione
In my recent post on Monet at the Grand Palais, I was praising the online gallery in which a large number of Monet’s works have been made viewable on the web in relatively high resolution images.

I say “relatively” because Haltadefinizione, or “HAL9000” (English version here), an Italian project specializing in high-definition photography, has made available on the web several great masterpieces in what can be considered extreme high resolution.

I wrote in 2007 about their high resolution online image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. That image consisted of 16 billion pixels, at the time reaching the limits of the technology.

Their more recent image of Botticelli’s La Primivera consists of 28 billion pixels, about 3,000 times the resolution of a consumer digital camera. The pixel density (pixels per inch, or ppi) has also increased, from 580 to 1,500ppi (magazine and book printing are typically 300ppi).

In contrast to the “gallery view” afforded by the online Monet exhibit (in which you can see individual brushstrokes wonderfully), these images are more like a “conservator’s view”, allowing you to zoom in to a level as if observed under a magnifying lens.

You need to be patient with the image as it loads, but once loaded, the interface is remarkably responsive as you zoom. The images are watermarked, but that’s a small quibble considering what they are offering, and you can work around the watermarks by altering the magnification level and scrolling a bit.

In addition to several works already imaged, they are working in cooperation with the famed Uffizi Gallery in Florence to digitize 24 of the great museum’s works.

So far, there are ten works viewable on the site:
Da Vinci’s Last Supper
Da Vinci’s Annunciation
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus
Verrocchio & Leonardo’s The Baptism of Christ
Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Life Stories of Christ
Pontormo’s Deposition
Agnolo Bronzino’s Elanor of Toledo
Francesco Paolo Michetti’s The Daughter of Iorio
Caravaggio’s Bacchus

In addition Botticelli’s La Primavera is available on the la Repubblica site.

All are remarkable in their own way. The experience of putting your nose up to these works is amazing.

I had the pleasure of spending the better part of an hour with Botticelli’s La Primavera and Birth of Venus (image above) when I was in Florence a few years ago.

I won’t say that the digital image is a substitute for seeing great works like this in person, it’s a different experience with its own plusses and minuses (I couldn’t put my nose up to the canvas), but if you can’t get to the Uffizi, it may well be the next best thing.

[Via Underwire]

[Addendum: (2013) This has largely been superseded by the Google Art Project, for which no account is necessary to view all the high definition images, and within which the images are not annoyingly watermarked.

Here is the Uffizi Gallery’s selections on the Google Art Project, including The Birth of Venus and La Primavera.

See my posts on the Google Art Project.]

Link: Haltadefinizione
Haltadefinizione, English version

Paul Felix

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CategoriesConcept & Visual Dev.

Paul Felix
Paul Felix is a visual development artist whose credits include Disney feature animation titles like Mulan, Brother Bear, The Little Mermaid, Lilo & Stitch, Tarzan and The Emperor’s New Groove.

Felix doesn’t maintain a website, so John Nevarez, himself a talented visual development and storyboard artist for animation, and an ardent admirer of Paul Felix’s work, has stepped in and created an Unofficial Paul Felix blog to bring him to the attention of art appreciators like us (grin).

Felix’s work is wonderful, full of springy linework, terrific draftsmanship and the vivid outpourings of a fertile imagination.

His command of line and tone in the representation not only of the layout and design of proposed scenes, but of their atmosphere and feeling, is brilliant.

Nevarez has been kind enough to post most of the images with larger versions, in which you can get an appreciation for Felix’s style and approach, his fluidity of line and subtle use of value; all in the service of images that are not meant to be final drawings, but merely guides for the design and composition of final animation drawings.

I’ve included some closer crops with the images above. The blog also features some of Felix’s superb color work.

Wonderful stuff.

[Suggestion via Zelda Devon, see my post on Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon.]

Link: http://unofficialpaulfelix.blogspot.com
John Nevarez blog
My 2005 post about John Nevarez

Monet at the Grand Palais

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CategoriesGallery and Museum Art

Monet at the Grand Palais
It may surprise lovers of Impressionism in the U.S. and Britain that Claude Monet, the artist whose name most hold synonymous with Impressionism, doesn’t evoke the same level of reverence in his native France. Not that he isn’t popular; the French just seem a bit more blasé about their cornucopia of Impressionist works and the nominal star of the group.

A new exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris seeks to change that, if by no other means than overwhelming visitors with the sheer number of Monet’s stunning works collected in a single place.

Over 200 of his paintings have been collected from museums in France and around the world, in an exhibition that spans Monet’s career from the early realism of the 1860’s to the fiery Impressionist canvasses of the 1920’s.

The Grand Palais’s own website has always been essentially useless in seeking information about exhibitions there, which are usually mounted by other institutions. The Musée d’Orsay, co-sponsor of the exhibition, also has little to offer.

On digging further, I found that the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the other co-sponsor, has the in depth information about the exhibit.

Jackpot.

If you’re a regular reader of Lines and Colors, you may have heard me gripe about the relative lack of high-resolution art images on the web, frustrated with the small teaser images most sites seem to find sufficient.

The website for Exhibition Monet 2010 (English version here) is a bounty of zoomable high-resolution images of works from the exhibition.

You have to be willing to wait through a somewhat slow-loading Flash interface, but in the Gallery you will find beautiful images of Monet’s work, in most cases two or three times common screen resolution.

The gallery is arranged chronologically. Click on an individual image, or click on “All the Paintings” at left to start at the earliest, and you can move through them in order.

Be sure to click on the images themselves to zoom to the larger version (linked for most though not quite all of the paintings). Do yourself the favor of clicking the plus sign to bring the view all the way up to 100% to see the images in proper focus (they are slightly blurry in lower resolutions), and you will be rewarded with images of Monet’s work in which you can see the texture of the individual brushstrokes.

If you are interested enough in Monet to view all of the paintings, be prepared for a major time sink. I don’t know if all 200 or so paintings from the exhibition are included in the online gallery, but they may well be.

It’s wonderful to tour through Monet’s 60 year career, watch his approach evolve and change, and in particular, to see several of the famous series, the haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, Houses of Parliment, and of course the water lilies, in which he repeatedly painted the same subject at different times in different light.

For those who live near Paris, or can travel there (sigh), the exhibition runs until 24 January, 2011.

You may want to book your tickets early, by all accounts the exhibition is fulfilling its role in generating the kind of enthusiasm for Monet in France that he has enjoyed in the the U.S. and Britain for the last 100 years.

Even if you think you know Monet, this exhibition, and its online version, may reveal him anew; perhaps allowing you to begin to see through the Impressionist master’s remarkable eyes.

Cezanne reportedly said of him: “Monet is just an eye — but God, what an eye!”

Link: Exposition Monet 2010, in English

Peanuts turns 60

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CategoriesComics

Peanuts, first and next to last strips, Charles M. Schultz.
Peanuts, the iconic comic strip with a title its author hated, began 60 years ago today on October 2nd, 1950.

The name was tacked on by the syndicate, arguing that the name Charles Schultz wanted, “L’il Folks”, was too close to the names of other current strips, and downplaying the viability of his subsequent suggestion, “Good Ol’ Charlie Brown”.

The strip was amazingly successful, particularly given that its protagonist was the epitome of lack of success (making him, of course, the character so many could identify with).

The first strip, shown above, top and reprinted here, set the tone.

Peanuts ran until February 13, 2000, and was one of the most popular and influential comic strips of all time.

Comics.com maintains an archive here.

Schultz insisted that the strip die with him, and not be carried on by assistants (which he didn’t use) or surrogates, as was common practice for comic strips in the 20th Century when their creators died or retired.

A few months after his death, on May 27, 2000, more than a hundred of his fellow cartoonists honored Schultz and his creation with special tribute versions of their own comics.

The Peanuts strip was a farewell and thanks, but the next to the last strip, a Sunday shown above and linked here, was if anything, darker. Drawn by a seriously ill Schulz, it shows our protagonist still unable to kick the football after nearly 50 years of that running gag.

[Addendum: Akkkk! OK, it’s Peppermint Patti, not CB with the football in the rain, but you get the idea.]

Good grief!

Link: Peanuts on Comics.com