Generating a Flyover from a Single Image

Computer scientists have developed software that generates a drone-like flyover video based on a single input image. (Link to YouTube) 

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Scientific paper: Infinite Nature: Perpetual View Generation of Natural Scenes from a Single Image

Peter Brown Paints a Street Scene

 Urban plein-air painter Pete "The Street" Brown shares his thoughts as he paints a London cityscape.

(Link to YouTube) 

He talks about the difficulty of choosing a motif and his ideas about "mapping out" the shapes with a brush on a piece of toned MDF board or canvas.

The video shows how he builds up the image with blocks of tone rather than with lines defining boundaries.

MDF Board, (11 x 14 in,)

Achenbach's Snowy Forest

Andreas Achenbach (German, 1815 - 1910) painted this watercolor of a rune stone in a clearing of a northern pine forest in winter. 

Andreas Achenbach, Snowy Forest, watercolor, 1835, 

Google Art Project, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Stones with carved runes date back to the times of the ancient shamans in Germany. 

According to Google Art project, the painting is huge: 14 x 20 feet (625cm x 423 cm). If that's true, perhaps it's not surprising, as the Düsseldorf painters often painted theatrical backdrops. 

The painting evokes romantic associations of the human touch in the wilds of nature.

Here's a detail showing a fallen tree and a young sapling. The original painting has a subtle balance of warm and cool colors and there are touches of opaque white gouache on the tips of the branches.

Wilhelm von Abbema, German, 1812 - 1889, based on the original 

by Andreas Achenbach. Published by Julius Buddeus, Düsseldorf.

Philadelphia Museum, Plate: 20 7/8 x 28 5/8 inches (53.1 x 72.7 cm) 

Sheet: 23 7/16 x 30 7/8 inches (59.6 x 78.5

The painting was made into an etching by Wilhelm von Abbema. 

Book:

Landscapes by Andreas Achenbach / Fritz von Wille

Valuable Surrealist Painting Recovered from German Trash Bin

This painting by Yves Tanguy (French 1900-1955), was recovered by authorities from a trash bin at a German airport.

"An unnamed businessman forgot the canvas—an untitled and undated work by French painter Yves Tanguy—at a check-in counter when boarding a flight from Düsseldorf to Tel Aviv on November 27, according to a statement from the local police force. He soon realized that the 16- by 24-inch painting, which he’d stored in a flat cardboard box, had gone missing, and upon arriving in Israel, immediately contacted German authorities."

Smithsonian: $340,000 Surrealist Painting Found in Recycling Bin at German Airport

Thanks, Susan

The Supporting Players

What's striking right away about the composition here is the clustering of lambs and ewes at the center of interest.  

August Friedrich Schenck (1828-1901) Sheep in a Meadow, 1865

But take a look at how he handles the other areas of the picture. The watchful rams on the right are rendered in tones that are grouped very closely in dark values. Same with the plants in the lower right. There are textures, but they're played way down. And the sky has clouds and a little glimpse of blue, but it's all held in light values.

How you handle the supporting areas is crucial to the whole picture working effectively. It reminds me of supporting players in the theater. The famous test of a great actor is to watch what they do with their face, their hands, and their body when another actor is talking.

Hugh Thomson's Illustration

Hugh Thomson (1860-1920) was born in Ireland and traveled to London, where he illustrated William, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austin. He has been associated with the "Cranford School" of illustration, inspired "by the literature, art, costume or atmosphere of England in the eighteenth century." 

This "wig and powder" style of illustration, "specialized in the nostalgic recreation of a by-gone golden era before the ravages of industrialization."

More about Hugh Thomson on Wikipedia 

Vladimir Makovsky's "Before Explaining"

A young man and a young woman have taken a walk together in the forest, stopping at a moss covered rock. The title of the painting is "Before Explaining." 

Before Explaining by Vladimir Makovsky, 1900

The young man wears a military jacket and the woman is busy with something in her hands, perhaps knitting. The artist, Vladimir Makovsky (Russian, 1846-1920), doesn't tell us who is going to do the explaining or what is the unspoken matter between them. We're left to guess, based on a close examination of the evidence at hand.

How Makovsky chose to present this intriguing encounter reminds me of the American illustrator Howard Pyle, who was illustrating books during this same period. 

Pyle was also aware of choosing a moment just before a key event, or just after. In every story he looked for what he called the “supreme moment,” the phase of action that conveys the most suspense, often a fateful encounter or a moment of decision.

More in my essay "Pyle as a Picturemaker" at the Norman Rockwell Museum site.

Gerome: Truth and the Well

Jean Leon Gérôme (French 1824-1904) produced several paintings of Truth as a nude woman holding a whip as she emerges from a well. The idea is based on an aphorism by Democritus: "We know nothing of reality, for Truth is hidden in a well." 

Gérôme was thinking of photography in connection with this idea. The camera offered immediate access to a source of truth that was not previously available. It seemed to transcend subjectivity and it gave artists a valuable tool.

Gérôme was positive and progressive in his views on photography. 

He said: “Photography is an art. It forces artists to discard their old routine and forget their old formulas. It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen; a great and inexpressible service for Art. It is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back.”

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Wikipedia on Truth and the Well

Books

Jean-Léon Gérôme (Skira Edition)

The Life and Work of Jean-Leon Gerome (Sotheby's English)

The Beholder's Share

The artist only does half of the work of a painting. The other half is done by the viewer.

Honore Daumier's sketch of the Salon: 

"THE VISITOR: – Just look at this senseless arrangement… and these colours!… hideous! 

THE ARTIST: – Cretin of a bourgeois… buzz off!

This idea is sometimes referred to as the "beholder's share," a term popularized by art historians Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) and Ernst Kris (1900-1957). 

The beholder is the partner of the creator and is deeply involved in the process of bringing an image to life. 

Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead

Images that are more open-ended in their interpretation involve the viewer in a particularly strong way. Ernst Kris said 'Great works are great because they are ambiguous." 

Eric Kandel discusses the topic of the beholder's share in this episode of Big Think.

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Three Stages of Vision

Vision doesn't occur passively. It's active, constructive, and largely unconscious.

And it doesn't happen all at once. Sometimes it takes a half second to process an image, and sometimes it takes a second or two. 

The light entering our eyes is translated and organized in stages, beginning with simple visual elements and proceeding to higher levels of interpretation. These stages of image processing start in the retina and continue in different parts of the brain.

For us to be able to see the flying white horses, our brain must segment the image and relegate the dark red shapes to the background, rather than vice versa. 

This kind of sorting normally happens unconsciously, but it's easy to intentionally flip the one set of horses from figure to ground and back again. 

Identifying the figure as a mythological flying horse and the whole pattern as a piece of art by M.C. Escher is the final and most sophisticated stage in image processing, involving several areas of the brain.

Eric R. Kandel et al., authors of a textbook on the Principles of Neural Science, describe the process this way:

"The brain analyzes a visual scene at three levels: low, intermediate, and high. At the lowest level, visual attributes such as local contrast, orientation, color, and movement are discriminated. The intermediate level involves analysis of the layout of scenes and of surface properties, parsing the visual image into surfaces and global contours, and distinguishing foreground from background. The highest level involves object recognition. Once a scene has been parsed by the brain and objects recognized, the objects can be matched with memories of shapes and their associated meanings."

Book: Principles of Neural Science by E.R. Kandel, et al.