Category: Vision and Optics
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Optical Illusions Sites
As much as I despise the deliberate campaign by mid-20th Century modernist art critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg to denigrate the history and traditions of western art in order to elevate their own pompous theories (in the process killing realism for half a century), I will grant that they were correct about one…
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Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoît Mandelbrot is not an artist in the usual sense of the word. He doesn’t work with oils, watercolors, pastels or colored pencils, yet he has created work of extraordinary beauty. Benoît Mandelbrot is a mathematician. He coined the term “fractal” in 1975 to describe a shape that appears similar at all levels of magnification.…
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handprint : watercolors and
watercolor paintinghandprint is the personal site of Bruce MacEvoy. The home page displays an unlabeled group of eight graphic symbols reflecting entry points to the sections of the site, which are a rather bizarre amalgam of his personal interests, from literary experiments to essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, human evolution and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of…
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The Ambassadors
(Hans Holbein the Younger)Many artists of note have “stand-out” works – paintings, drawings or other works that rise to the top of their oeuvre and serve as the work associated with their name. Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors not only fits that distinction, but stands out as one of the most enigmatic and unusual paintings in the…
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Eye Placement in Portraits
Here is an interesting bit of scientific/artistic conjecture. Christopher W. Tyler, of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco suggests in this short (1 page) illustrated article that a high percentage of portrait paintings are arranged so that one eye, presumably the dominant one, falls on the horizontal center line of the image, even…
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Stephen Wiltshire – memory drawing
Here’s a question for those of you who draw from life: How often and how long do you look at your subject when drawing? Do you look up at the model or scene frequently, grabbing a fresh impression for each tiny bit of drawing, or do you take in as much as you can in…