Cornelius Mazurka once conducted a seventy-five-piece consort of brassmen and hadros in Ruhmsburg. For many years he lived in a partially collapsed tower of the ruined bridge over the Jubila River.
During their journey to Chandara, Arthur Denison and Bix convince him to pack up his instrument collection and leave the city so he can start life again.
To create the painting “Thermala: Alpine Hideaway” I needed some reference for the lighting.
"the neurons in the visual system beyond the rods and cones have large receptive fields. This means that the small, involuntary eye movements made when fixating on something fail to move the stimulus onto a new cell's receptive field, in effect giving unvarying stimulation."
Source: Wikipedia on Troxler's Fading
Thomas Cole, Youth, from Voyage of Life, oil on canvas
Thomas Cole (1801-1848) lived less than a decade after the invention of photography, but he already recognized what a game changer it would be for his fellow artists. He assessed the impact when writing to a friend:
"I suppose you have read a great deal about the daguerrotype. If you believe everything the newspapers say, you would be led to suppose that the poor craft of painting was knocked in the head by this new machinery for making Nature take her own likeness, and we have nothing to do but give up the ghost . . . This is the conclusion: that the art of painting is creative, as well as an imitative art, and is in no danger of being superseded by any mechanical contrivance."
I wonder how he would respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by today's art-generating machines.
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Quoted from the book: The Painter and the Photograph
"On the top left you can see the faint figure of the artist concentrated while working at easel. A chaotic crowd of allegorical figures flows out of the canvas at which the painter is sitting and into the space of the painting. Through the clothes and props held in their hands, the billowing column refers to the tragic history of Poland in the 19th century."
"Among the floating crowd you can see representatives of many social categories, insurgents, priests, children, desperate women, convicts in chains, scythemen and Napoleonic soldiers. The dominant props include weapons, scythes mounted on edge, bayonets, sabers and guns, some people hold violins, books, hourglasses and paintbrushes instead of weapons."
"The crowd seems to be heading towards the illuminated window, but only a few, decrepit old men reach the window sill and are unable to cross it. [At] the window stands a mysterious female figure in black robes, the title Melancholia, who prevents dozens of procession participants from penetrating the space symbolizing freedom."
"As a professor at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, the artist repeatedly told students 'Paint so that Poland is resurrected,' thus clearly defining the meaning and purpose of his own work.
(Source: Polish Wikipedia)
This leviathan is a variation of my larger sea monster painting. In this one I wanted the viewer to see the head of the creature first and then to glance down and take in the unfolding disaster.
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Leviathan, gouache, 9x12 inches |
The Famous Artist School marketed its correspondence course with print ads and direct mail, but also with these video ads in the 1950s.
Warrior Woman, an oil painting for a paperback cover, plus one of the tone paper studies I did for it.
In Thomas Couture's 1873 painting "The Thorny Path," four men struggle to pull a cart driven by an angelic figure.
According to the Philadelphia Art Museum, the image is Couture's satire on the decadence of French society during the 1870s. They note that the carriage is pulled...
"...not by animals but by four male captives who represent different ages and states of society. The naked old man leading the procession is flabby from indulgence; the troubadour following him, a symbol of young love, parodies the medieval ballads popular in nineteenth century France. The old soldier bends his head in self-reproach, and the young student writes as he walks, symbolizing the educated nobility's ignorance of the realities of daily life. The thistles and thorny plants along the road suggest the painfulness of their journey. The decrepit figure seated at the rear of the carriage with a bottle of wine in her basket foreshadows the courtesan's future. Finally, Couture signed his initials on the stone figure at center, which seems to be laughing at the entourage."
When I need a model, I set up a mirror and some charcoal paper, and I draw.
With a wig and a costume and a scowl, I can be anybody—in my imagination at least.
During a break I forget to take off the wig, much to the amusement of FedEx man, who chooses that moment to come by the house.
The final painting appears as a gatefold in Nintendo Power magazine to promote the game Dinotopia: Timestone Pirates.
(Link for more info.)
Am I listening to the sermon? Well, sort of. I'm monitoring the droning sound with half an ear. 
But really, most of my conscious attention is devoted to understanding the amazing weaving of those French braids. She tells me later that she wove them all by herself by feel, without even looking in the mirror.
Aren't humans amazing?
Look what came up in my YouTube feed: a nice introduction and overview of my work.
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A little later today, Heritage Auctions will conduct a sale of American art that includes landscapes by Bierstadt and Homer Dodge Martin, and illustrations by the likes of J.C. Leyendecker (above) and Maxfield Parrish.
DreamWorks Animation co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg made himself unpopular in the animation industry when he predicted a few days ago that AI would make feature film production ten times more efficient and reduce the number of artists by 90%.
He said: “In the good old days, when I made an animated movie, it took 500 artists five years to make a world-class animated movie,” he said. “I think it won’t take 10% of that. Literally, I don’t think it will take 10% of that three years from now.”
Katzenberg, creator of the failed video app Quibi, is wrong on this prediction for at least four reasons:
1. AI will lead to a proliferation of second-guessing. Since everyone in the organization, including bean-counters and paper pushers, can generate alternate takes at the press of a button, it will be hard for any creative organization to commit to any set of decisions without facing the inevitable chorus of "Why don't we try this instead?" This effect will slow production, not speed it up.
2. Innovations won't come from the top down, but rather from the bottom up. AI techniques will surely lead to artistic innovations, new production methods, and even new art forms. But the animation production pipelines are so well established in studios like Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks that they can't easily adapt to radically new toolsets. The filmmakers to watch are the little breakaway upstarts, the tiny mammals currently running around the ankles of the dinosaurs.
3. In practice they don't take you all the way to the finish line. Even though AI methods seem to magically produce immediate, sexy-looking results that would take teams of people weeks or months to produce, they still require the same kind of human expertise and effort to get really first rate results that the public will accept.
