Looking at Art on the Internet

In my college days, all of our studies of art history were conducted in the form of slides projected on a wall in a darkened room. This is actually a very curious way to study art, as light projected on a white wall doesn’t actually look anything like what a painting does in real life.  This manner of viewing also takes away the importance of scale and texture and leads to a skewed impression of what art actually looks like.  (A few years later, it also lead to an embarrassing incident in a major museum where, on a search for Vermeer, I walked right by the painting I wanted to see. In slide lectures, it was always wall sized. I had no idea the real painting was only about 8 inches high.)

I think that looking at art on the internet may be an even worse way to view art than the slide lectures back in college. The two images above are versions of a drawing by Henry Fuseli, found by using Google image search. Stand back for a moment and notice what a radically different first impression each one gives.

Egon, we hardly knew Ye

 

Egon Schiele died October 31, 1918. This is a little tribute.

Porntrait

Trying to do that Holbein minimalist rendering thing. Portrait from a video still.

Really need to work on my photography.

Deluxe studio setup

Works in progress

1 art-school style drawing bench

1 24×24 inch MDF board

1 roll paper towels

1 roll painter’s tape

6 cheap brushes

1 iThingy (for reference pics)

16 clamps from hardware store

Deviants and Porn

I’ve been sketching using stock photos from deviantart.com and porn as references.

Oomph!

The previous versions lacked a certain graphic ‘oomph’ that I was looking for. I think this is the final version. Time to move on to something else.

Varying the variations

The last batch of photos weren’t that good. I should have learned now that people will pick apart a piece based on a lousy photo.

Blogging again

Working on variations of the same pose. I felt that the first one was a bit too meh, so I tried to jazz it up a bit.