July Lecture in the Catskills

This coming July 8th at 7 pm in the Catskill Mountains of New York, I’ll be a one-day guest lecturer at the Grand Central Academy’s Summer Workshops for a presentation on color and light.


I’ll give an evening lecture during the workshop of Senior Hudson River Fellow, Thomas Kegler (above). His week-long course called “Field Study for the Studio Landscape Painter.” Tom’s work has the rare quality of being closely observed and poetically inspired, and he could have held his own with any of the traditional Hudson River School painters (Kegler's "Buffalo Creek Dusk," below). 


My lecture will cover material from the new book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, geared for plein air painters who want to explore the methods of the pre-impressionist Hudson River School Painters. Besides the digital slide show, I’ll have original paintings to show and books to share. If it’s like last time I visited, there will be plenty of opportunity for camaraderie and shop talk.

The full course will go from July 5 - 17, 2011 (10 instructed days, 1 free uninstructed day). The tuition is $1350, which includes Mr. Kegler’s instruction, park fees, 2 group meals, and my lecture. The class is open and is now accepting registrations.
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Previous GJ Posts on the Hudson River Fellowship.
Color and Light on Amazon
Grand Central Academy's Summer Workshops
Senior Hudson River Fellow, Thomas Kegler

Van Gogh’s Color Schemes Served as Pie Charts

There are various ways to show a color scheme in diagrammatic form. One way is through the color gamut overlaid on the color wheel, as I’ve shown several times on this blog and in my book. That’s best for defining which color types are in and out of your scheme.


But it doesn’t let you know how much of each color is represented in the color scheme. To show that, you can graph the distribution of colors in a pie chart. Here’s one from Arthur Buxton’s blog. It converts 28 Van Gogh paintings into sector graphs showing the percentages of the five most common colors in each painting.

Warm colors in the dark yellow family predominate, often played against deep blues. Van Gogh doesn’t use much green, red or violet.

Working in reverse, from a set of pie chart to a series of pictures, this would be a useful method for film or graphic novel designers to plan color scripts.
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Arthur Buxton’s blog
via BoingBoing
suggested by John Harris and Susan Fox

The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer

I spent the day with Albrecht Dürer’s monsters yesterday.


An exhibition at Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts presents about 75 prints from the museum’s collection of more than 300 woodcuts, engravings, and etchings by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the supreme master of northern Renaissance printmaking.




The emphasis is on monsters, witches, hybrid animals and marauding soldiers. An introduction to a room themed with images of the suffering of Christ and the horrors of war says:

“Just as the media of the twenty-first century—whether films, video games, or comic books—reflect the pervasiveness of violence in our culture, Dürer’s images mirrored his own society’s fascination with human torment..”

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The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer will continue through March 13.
Visitor's Information for the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, USA Exhibit is free.

"Decoration is a Sin"

In the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” American architect Frank Gehry (b. 1929) says, “I grew up a modernist. Decoration is a sin.”


A sin, really? Does Mr. Gehry believe that Notre Dame would be better off stripped of its angels and gargoyles? Would he stucco over the arabesques of the Alhambra? Would he delete the ornaments from the Parthenon?


Although I respect some aspects of Mr. Gehry’s work, I disagree with him on this point. In able hands, decoration is a gift, a joy, virtue. Decoration is not a frosting applied to form. When it’s well orchestrated, it meets our fundamental desire for visual rhythm, order, and variety of scale.

Decoration in some form has been central to every visual culture through all history and across all cultures, until it was banished by the priests of minimalism in the twentieth century. The absence of decoration is one cause of the sterility and impoverishment of much modern architecture.


If decoration is a sin, then I’m a sinner. If I’m going out to a concert, I’d rather go to the Paris Opera, which is gloriously decorated.....


.....than Gehry’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, New York (above), which is not.
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"Sketches of Frank Gehry" Documentary--2 minute trailer 
Notre Dame Cathedral
Alhambra on Wikipedia
Parthenon on Wikipedia
Frank Gehry on Wikipedia
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addendum: Adolf Loos's 1908 essay "Ornament and Crime" on Wikipedia
Thanks, Digitect and Christoph Heuer

Homemade and Mail Order

This stove and chair, sketched at a history museum in Fairplay, Colorado, suggest that the family sent away for the cast iron stove, and made the chair themselves out of planks of wood.
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South Park City museum in Fairplay, a restored 1880s mining town.

Hyperlink Placement

In the world of print, you can attract attention to a word by placing it in bold face or italics. Or you can underline it. Or you can put a number after it to refer the reader to a footnote¹ or an endnote².

In the world of the Internet, you can also give it a hyperlink. Since the link is usually colored and underlined, it automatically conveys emphasis. A hyperlink is similar to a footnote because promises clarification or contextualization.

The Chicago Manual of Style, drawing upon centuries of established print tradition, suggests rules for using boldface, italics, underlining, and footnotes.

What about hyperlinks? When and where should we use them?

According to prevailing wisdom, providing a link in the middle of a section of text benefits the reader. Like the footnote, it can reveal a source, explain a term, or provide a deeper excursion into a given topic. For example, if you link the “Battle of the Bulge,” your reader presumes that by clicking on the link, there will be some web page waiting that expounds on that topic.

But the reader doesn’t necessarily know where the link leads. Wikipedia, maybe? Or some World War II site? Placing the cursor over the link brings up the URL code at the bottom of the window, and right-clicking it can open it in a separate window for later perusal.

Nicolas Carr, in his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain, argues that links embedded in running text interrupt the flow of thought. Somewhere in the back of his brain the reader must make a few judgments: Where will this link take me? Should I make the jump now or come back later? Should I skip it altogether?

These judgments must be added to the cognitive load of reading the passage itself. It’s like trying to read while someone is tugging on your sleeve. Carr argues that these competing thoughts interfere with comprehension. Even worse, if the reader actually follows the links, there’s a risk of losing him entirely.

One solution to this problem is to resist linking until the end, and then to present an array of choices, like doors at the end of a hallway. That way the reader can sustain attention for the full written piece without distraction.

In a web essay, Carr experiments with placing all his links at the end.

Carr make an interesting point. Why not link at the end of a piece? The reader can recall the key concepts or names when he or she sees them again in the endlinks. Because endlinks don’t need to fit into the syntax of a sentence, they can be composed to suggest not only the topic but the destination. For example, instead of “Battle of the Bulge,” the endlink can read: “Battle of the Bulge on U.S. Army's Official Site.”

Carr’s argument won me over—but not completely. You may have noticed I have generally shifted my linking strategy, putting them mostly at the end.

There’s no need to be a purist. Sometimes you might want the reader to head out through a side door, and that a kind of channel-surf-skim-reading style is one of the pleasures of the Internet. Not all pieces of writing are long rational expositions requiring uninterrupted concentration. And, as several people pointed out in the comments after Mr. Carr’s essay, embedded links can signal the credibility of the writer’s source material, something that a reader might want to establish before the end.

What link-placement strategy do you prefer? Please let me know in the comments.
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NOTES and ENDLINKS
1. Traditional footnotes aren’t really possible on a Web page, since the “page” is scalable and infinitely long; therefore, on a computer, they’re all really endnotes.
2. Amazon’s Kindle handles endnotes by following the word with an asterisk. That asterisk links within the e-book database to the relevant note.

LINKS
Battle of the Bulge on U.S. Army's official site
Battle of the Bulge on Wikipedia
Chicago Manual of Style Online (a subscription service with a free trial)
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain on Amazon
"Cognitive Load in Hypertext Reading: A Review." by DeStefano and LeFevre, Carleton U.
Nicolas Carr’s Blog Post: "Experiments in Delinkification" (May 31, 2010)
The Scholarly Kitten blog: "Arguing Against Links"
ReadWriteWeb: "The Case Against Links"

Fitz and Van

Many of the car ads that appeared in the magazines and car brochures in the 1960s were gouache paintings done by a duo named Fitz and Van.


“Fitz,” was short for Art Fitzpatrick. He painted the cars, while “Van,” or Van Kaufman, did the people and backgrounds.

An article authored by Arthur St. Antoine, Editor at Large, Motor Trend has some interesting technical notes. For example:

"To produce his famous “wide” look, Fitzpatrick traced photos of the new car, cut the tracings into pieces, then ‘stretched’ the car into bolder proportions.

‘We wanted pictures that were different,’ Fitzpatrick says. ‘Impact is the name of the game, so we went with predominately front views—even cropping the cars so they looked too big for the page.’

The two artists would then trade the image back and forth, Kaufman (who passed away in 1995) adding the people and the backdrops (often featuring such exotic locales as Monte Carlo, Corfu, and Acapulco), Fitzpatrick painting the car and tying it all together with the color and reflections of the scene.’

Fitzpatrick said: ‘I’ve always maintained that a picture of a car moving doesn’t mean a thing. They all move. You have to convey something about the car psychologically. It’s all about image. That’s the reason people buy cars.’
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Motor Trend article about the collaboration
Image from Pontiacs Online article (lots more there)
Fitz-Art.com
Thanks, Ed Ahlstrom
Previously on GurneyJourney: Chrysler Personalities,  Car Names

Dog-a-Saurus

Damian Johnson reworked this photo of me shooting a maquette to show the “Real Gurney Method.”


The original photo, along with the story of the making of the Tylosaurus painting, is covered in the upcoming February/March issue of International Artist.
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Previous Posts: Painting Tylosaurus.
International Artist magazine
Thanks, Damian!

Amazing Powers of the Octopus

David Attenborough narrates this video clip showing how the cuttlefish and octopus can make rapid changes in color, shape, texture. These abilities, in combination with a formidable reasoning ability, can bluff predators or confuse prey.


Such displays of awareness and responsiveness in invertebrates force us to revise our notions of intelligence in the animal kingdom, and they provide fresh ideas for creature designers.
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Direct link to YouTube page
Via Best of YouTube.

Jeffrey Catherine Jones Video

A documentary about the fantasy artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones is in the works. Below is a preview (which contains some artistic nudity).

I haven’t seen the finished production, but it promises to explore the life and the difficult choices faced by Jeffrey Catherine Jones. The trailer suggests the theme that art can rescue a person at difficult moments in their life, perhaps something we can all identify with.

Rebecca Guay, Mike Kaluta, Rick Berry, Mark Chiarello, and Moebius all make cameo appearances.

The film is directed by DC Comics art director Maria Cabardo, who is seeking additional financial backing to finish the project.
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Link to video

Thanks, Tom Babbey