Art By Committee: Keep an Eye Out

Many of you have asked that we bring back the group sketch game called "Art By Committee," which was in hiatus during a busy fall and winter.


For those new to the game, the way it works is that I share an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript and you come up with a way to visualize it. To view previous games, follow this link.

The quote this time is “I should stay here and keep an eye out.”


To make the game easier on all of us, Andy W suggested that we make it once a month instead of once a week. (Check out Andy's blog "Panel Discussion," where he offers his new Eclectic Comics, where he has published work that he's done for Art By Committee.)

And Dave H suggested that to save bandwidth you put the contest entries on a photo filesharing setup like Photobucket, and I can link to your entry from the blog post. Maybe in the comments one of you can explain better how this should work.

So let's try it! Please send me either a link to your full-size file and a JPG of 200 pixels across and please compress it as much as possible. Title it with your name, email it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and let me know in your email the full URL of the link to your blog or website if you have one (even if you gave it to me before). Please have your entries in by Thursday the 12th of February at 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA, and I’ll put them up on the 15th.

Blindsight

Recent experiments by Beatrice de Gelder of Tilburg University in the Netherlands showed that a blind man in Switzerland could respond to the visual world without his conscious awareness.

“TN,” as he is known, has a unique condition. His occipital lobe, the part of the brain responsible for seeing, was damaged by two strokes, but his eyes still function normally.



When he was asked to navigate past a series of obstacles, he responded successfully. The researchers ruled out auditory or other non-visual perception. Apparently, TN was using a subconcious type of vision. He could not form an image in the conventional sense.

“Blindsight” is the ability to see at the subcortical level, where images are processed by the amygdala and other primitive parts of the brain. As the New York Times put it: “The brain has a primitive, subconscious visual system working in tandem with our conscious visual sense.”

Other experiments have shown that blind-seeing patients also respond emotionally to social signals like angry faces, even though they’re not aware of seeing them at all.

What are the implications of these revelations for us as artists? Even though our visual systems are intact, there is a deep part of us that responds to basic images—things like barriers that we might bump into, sources of illumination, or faces that might threaten us.

We’ve all experienced related phenomena. It happens when we react viscerally to something that looks like a snake or an insect, making us recoil a split second before we consciously register the object. It happens when we look at an optical illusion that persists in “fooling” our rational mind. It happens when a painting or a book cover “speaks” to us from across the room before we’re even aware of it.

Vision is more than just a function of rational awareness. It is also a profound ocean of experience, with strange stirrings that move us deep below the surface.
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Article in the Guardian, link.

West Clare Graveyard

I woke up before dawn in Kilnaboy, County Clare, Ireland to paint this graveyard. The church was in ruin behind me. Three gravestones with Celtic crosses rose up from the overgrown grass to be blessed by the first rosy light of morning.

James Perry Wilson’s Dioramas, Part 2

In the midst of World Wart II, a young soldier wrote a series of letters to James Perry Wilson, painter of the illusionistic diorama backdrops for the American Museum of Natural History in New York (see yesterday's post). Mr. Wilson replied with valuable insights about his approach to color and atmosphere:

“It is one of the fundamental principles of aerial perspective that the dark tones of a landscape are the first ones affected by the interposed veil of atmosphere.

“A green tree in the foreground, for instance, will appear dark green in the shadows; but you don’t have to get very far away from it before that green disappears entirely, especially if you are looking toward the sun. In the middle distance the shadow areas in the foliage will take on a violet tone, while the sunlit parts are only a little cooler green than they are close up.

“At a distance of several miles this violet will become more and more blue. By this time air will have begun to affect the sunlit parts also, and the green will begin to disappear. A forest-covered mountain fifteen or twenty miles away, in clear air, will probably appear of a violet hue; but if it is fifty or sixty miles, it will be a clear pale blue.

“Another thing to remember is the effect of air on values. Here again it is the darkest tones that are affected first. The deep shadows and the halftones melt together, while the detail is still distinct in the highlights. As the distance increases, both dark and light objects approach the sky in value; but the light objects will hold out the longest.



Objects lighter than the sky grow darker as they recede, instead of lighter, and they grow warmer instead of cooler. You can observe this on a clear day when there are cumulus clouds in the sky. As the clouds recede they become yellowish, and those away off in the distance will be pinkish. (Note: the above image is the painted background from a Peabody Museum diorama.)

“The reason for this diverse behavior of light and dark objects is to be found in the fact that the air absorbs and scatters light of the shorter wavelengths toward the blue and violet end of the spectrum, while transmitting the reds and yellows whose wavelength is longer. Toward sunset, when the slanting rays of sunlight have to traverse a thicker layer of air, still longer wavelengths are filtered out and the sun appears red.


“Do you remember the band of pinkish light across the top of the mountain in the Jaguar group? What happens here is that all the blues are filtered out high up in the sky, and by the time the sunlight reaches the lower air and falls in front of the mountain, it is decidedly reddish. So you are looking at the mountain through a reddish veil instead of a bluish one.

“The most important thing to remember in painting a sunset effect is to keep all your tones harmonious and consistent. And if you have bright clouds, yellow or rose-colored in the blue sky, don’t paint your sky too blue. Keep the blue very quiet. That way your clouds will appear much more brilliant and luminous.”

Color Palettes
According to his assistant, Ruth Morrill, Wilson used the following nine colors, along with Permalba white.

Ultramarine blue
Cobalt blue
Windsor blue
Cadmium yellow pale
Cadmium yellow deep
Yellow Ochre
Indian red
Cadmium scarlet
Alizarin crimson

“He could make anything he wanted from those colors,” Ruth Morrill said. He did not use black and only rarely used browns. He regularly premixed graduated tints of each of the primaries on his palette before commencing to paint.



According to one of Wilson’s letters, the entire distance of the Connecticut shoreline diorama (above) was painted with ultramarine, light red and yellow ochre. “It is astonishing what variety you can get with these three,” he wrote, “especially since both the red and the yellow are rather subdued colors. I recommend your experimenting to see what you can do with just these three. They are bound to impart a mellow quality to the greens, which is a good thing.”
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More information
As blog reader Armand Cabrera pointed out, there’s a good article on JPW in American Art Review, December 2000. There’s another detailed article in the Peabody Museum publication Curator, October 2000. Both articles are written by Michael Anderson, who has compiled 20 years of research about Wilson. I am grateful to him and Ruth Morrill for sharing their unpublished interview material.

Jaguar image courtesy Supreme Fiction, which has an interview with Stephen Quinn about the art of the diorama, link.

James Perry Wilson’s Dioramas, Part 1

When you stand in front of a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it feels like you’re looking into miles of real space.


But just beyond the taxidermied animals and the fake twigs and leaves, you’re really gazing at a painting on a vertical wall just a few feet away from you. The slightest wrong color note or eyecatching brushstroke would jump out and shatter the effect.

The artist who painted these illusions was James Perry Wilson (1889-1976), who established the highest standard ever reached in diorama backdrop painting.


His first training was in architecture. He was mainly self-taught as a landscape painter. He traveled to study the environments that he sought to portray, making stereo photographs and plein air paintings on location, often using a “widescreen” format with two or more adjacent canvases.

According to contemporary accounts, he occasionally removed his clothes in remote locations and painted in the nude.

He captured both the artistic and scientific truth of a particular locale, with painstaking accuracy of botanical, atmospheric, and geological detail.

In addition to his work in New York, he painted some of the dioramas for the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, The Museum of Science in Boston, and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.



Every diorama has a “tie-in” area where the 3-D foreground comes up against the painted back wall. Nay-sayers had claimed that it’s impossible to represent water along the tie-in line. Rising to the challenge, Wilson designed the Connecticut shoreline diorama to feature a couple of areas with tie-ins crossing water areas, including the section above, where the painted illusion begins just beyond the turtle.

The full backdrop was often 35 feet wide or more, with a dome-shaped ceiling. This required large amounts of paint and careful mixtures. To make the perspective accurate across such a oddly curving surface, Wilson worked out a unique grid system that he called “the unsquare square” to compensate the foreshortening of the side sections.



Every backdrop was carefully planned using maquettes, color sketches, and full-size charcoals drawn on the backdrop before the final paint was applied. The tie-in area was the last section to be completed, and had to be painted with four-foot brushes after the foreground elements were in place.

Tomorrow I’ll share some rare notes and technical tips from JPW.
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More on Wilson
Wilson’s dioramas have been lovingly preserved thanks to the efforts of Michael Anderson of the Yale Peabody Museum, link,
Stephen Quinn of the American MNH, link,
and Ruth Morrill, JPW’s former assistant and the widow of dioramist Ralph Morrill.

Stephen Quinn’s book Windows on Nature chronicles the story of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History.

Continuation of this post: James Perry Wilson's Diorama's, Part 2.

Mr. Moha of Aït Benhaddou

Beyond the Grand Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the kasbahs are made from a reddish brown mudbrick, what we would call adobe in North America.



In the fortified city of Aït Benhaddou, I met Assofi Moha, a Berber man who sold leather and brass handicrafts to the occasional tourist.


He sat on a short stool in the sunny alley. I sat across from him, and when he saw me sitting on the ground, he took the little cushion off his own stool and offered it to me. We got talking and he agreed to pose for a quick watercolor portrait. The bright sun cast dark shadows from his features.



When the portrait was finished, I handed him a fountain pen, and he wrote his name.

Nacreous Cloud

Laurent Alquier, a connoisseur of unusual atmospheric phenomena, sent me this photo from his collection, with the following comment:

This is a case of Nacreous Cloud, horizontal rainbow diffused throughout a cloud layer. Apparently, these can be seen in northern countries closer to the pole.

More on nacreous or polar stratospheric clouds, link.
This photo is from the website Dark Roasted Blend, link

Spherical Panoramas

If you’re a visual person, and you haven’t yet experienced a spherical panorama, you’re in for a treat. It's also called Quicktime VR or QTVR.

A spherical panorama is a photographic representation of the full 360-degree field of vision. Using a special camera apparatus and a photo-stitching technique, an array of photos taken from a single point of observation are seamlessly mapped across the surface of a sphere or cube surrounding the viewer.


The photo above is really just a flattened cylindrical panorama, because it's just as hard to convey a spherical panorama in one illustration as it is to show a map of the globe on a flat piece of paper.

Using a special plugin from QuickTime (resident on a Mac, and downloadable for other computers), you can control your direction of view, and in some cases, you can zoom closer to any given region of the picture.
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A good place to start is the website “spherical panoramas” Link.
You can also find various images on “Fullscreen Quicktime Virtual Reality” Link.
Quicktime site: link.

Sprezzatura

Elvis didn't invent "cool."


“Sprezzatura” is a term coined by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 in The Book of the Courtier. It describes the cool, confident attitude often expressed in the portraiture of the time. The classic example is Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione himself.


Illustrator Shirley Hughes, in her memoir A Life Drawing suggests that discoveries of serious-looking Roman busts during the Renaissance led to a taste for the "devil may care" look in portraiture.

The word is related to the Italian “sprezzante,” meaning contemptuous or scornful, used here in the sense of disdaining effort. The goal is a certain nonchalance or carelessness, as if one’s mastery arrived almost by accident, and certainly not through any struggle.


At various times in history, artists have tried to capture this particular attitude, both in the disposition of their subjects and in their handling of paint. Sargent accomplished it in his portrait of his teacher Carolus Duran.

Rearranging Art Books

Today I rearranged the art books in my home library.



Before this, I had the monographs segregated in separate sections, the way they do in bookstores and libraries. There was one section for illustrators and another for 19th Century European artists and another old masters and another for children’s book artists.

But I had a feeling that all of my artist heroes would have enjoyed each other’s company if they were sitting together in the same pub. So why not put the books together under one alphabetical listing? They're also much easier to find this way.

Now Hals is rubbing shoulders with Homer, Rockwell is sitting next to Sargent, and Shepard is consorting with Sorolla. I wish I could hear what they’re talking to each other about.