Highlights and Specularity, Part 1

This photograph shows three spheres with varying surfaces. The one on the left is matte, the one in the middle is glossy, and the one on the right is highly reflective. 

On the matte sphere there is no highlight. On the glossy sphere in the middle, the highlight is clearly apparent. The mirror-like sphere on the right also has a highlight, which is really a reflection of the light source. The light source is the sun shining through a window.

The right sphere also reflects the scene around the ball, including the white paper background and the dark room behind the camera. In the right ball, you can even see a reflection of the middle ball, with a highlight in the middle of that reflection.

That same pattern of reflections of the paper, room, and neighboring ball is subtly visible in the middle ball as well.

In the middle ball, there is a second, smaller highlight just to the right of the primary highlight. This secondary highlight is the sunlight is reflected three times. The light bounces off the middle ball, bounces back off the right ball, and bounces again off that little highlight on middle ball back to your eye.

So we've arrived at a definition: A highlight is a specular reflection (Latin "speculum"=mirror) of the light source on a shiny surface. The shinier and smoother the surface, the brighter and clearer the highlight.

These three diagrams show what's happening at the surface level. On the matte surface, light arrives from the top left and hits the rough surface. Some light gets absorbed and the rest scatters away in all directions. This is what happens when light hits a matte surface like a sand dune or a sweater.

The glossy surface of the middle ball bounces a a portion of the light at the same relative angle as the incoming light, but some of the light rays hit uneven spots and bounce in random directions. This is like bouncing a golf ball on a country road. It will probably bounce the way you want it to unless the golf ball hits a crack or a pebble.

The mirror-like surface is so smooth that all the light bounces off the surface predictably at the same relative angle, like bouncing a ball off a basketball court. (Edit: a true mirror-like reflection requires a metallic surface, and cannot be achieved by smoothness alone. Thanks, David!)

Since highlights belong to the world of specular reflection, they should be thought of as somewhat separate and distinct from the normal modeling factors (light, halftone, and shadow) of diffuse reflection. Artists in the world of 3D computer graphics can control the form-modeling and the specularity as separate components.

I wrote an article on this subject of "highlights and specularity" for the current issue of International Artist magazine, which should be on the newsstands now. This blog post is just a little piece of it.

The six-page article contains a lot more examples and explanation, and it includes artwork that has never been reproduced in print before. I'll talk more on the blog about highlights in real-world examples tomorrow.
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International Artist magazine, Issue 90
This subject is also covered in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (Amazon), also available signed from my website store.

Martin Rico Exhibition

The first-ever comprehensive exhibition of the landscape paintings of Martin Rico y Ortega (Spanish, 1833-1908) is currently on exhibition at the Meadows museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

The exhibit features 106 works of art, including paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks, with sparkling views of Paris, Venice, and Madrid.


According to the museum, "Rico championed the technique of painting en plein air, famously painting while stationed in gondolas throughout the Venetian canals."


(Video link) The show is the fruit of a longstanding collaboration between the Meadows museum and the Prado in Madrid. It will continue through July 7.
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"Impressions of Europe: 19th-Century Vistas by Martín Rico"

Article on the show in Art Daily

Thanks, Fine Art Connoisseur magazine

Why do chimps paint?

(Video link) In his Big Think lecture, "What is Art?" Bard College president Leon Botstein makes the assertion that art is a distinctly human activity, unique to our species. This is a rather antiquated notion, one that scientists began to disprove 50 years ago.

It turns out that several kinds of animals make art. And their art-making behavior fits the definitions of art that Mr. Botstein proposes. These species range from birds, elephants, cetaceans, and most particularly, gorillas and chimpanzees.

One of the pioneering scientists in this field is Desmond Morris (born 1928), who wrote the 1963 book "The Biology of Art: A Study of the Picture-Making Behavior of the Great Apes and its Relationship to Human Art."  

Morris worked with a chimpanzee named Congo from the London Zoo. Congo picked up some art supplies and rapidly became obsessed with the experience, favoring it over eating or sex. 

Congo's artistic behavior appeared strangely human. Many of the design motifs he used were similar to those used by human artists. Morris said, "To put it simply, the position of one line influenced the position of the next line, and so on, until the drawing was considered (by the ape) to be finished."

Congo got angry when Morris tried to take away a painting before he was finished working on it. Morris says: “In tests with Congo it was repeatedly clear that he had a very distinct concept of when a drawing or painting was finished. On the rare occasions when attempts were made to encourage him to continue working on a picture that he considered ‘finished’, rather than on a new one, he lost his temper, whimpered, screamed, or, if actually persuaded to go on, proceeded to wreck the picture with meaningless or obliterative lines.” 

When Congo was “paid” with a treat for doing a painting, he started to lose interest in the work. This paradoxical behavior mirrors what happens with human children and adults. Rewards and praise have been shown to have a chilling effect on creativity and output. 

Morris summarized his observations into the six "biological principles of picture making."

1. The principle of Self-rewarding Activation The act of painting yields satisfaction apart from materialistic rewards.

2. The principle of Compositional Control When faced with a choice, chimps (and also capuchin monkeys and birds like jackdaws and crows) will select a more orderly arrangement of shapes. Given the tools to make marks, their pictures follow classic principles of balance and rhythmic repetition.

3. The principle of Calligraphic Differentiation Chimps develop increasingly complex shapes and marks, developed over time.

4. The principle of Thematic Variation Visual themes such as fan patterns emerge and go through variations, later to be replaced by different themes.

5. The principle of Optimum Heterogeneity There seems to be a preferred optimum between maximum simplicity and maximum complexity (a mass of random, fussy detail)

6. The principle of Universal Imagery Drawings of chimps seem to resemble humanoid faces not unlike those made by human children. In children from around the world, there are universal features to their initial and most basic drawings of houses and figures. 

Congo did over 400 paintings. His work was noted by art critics such as Waldemar Januszczak. Picasso collected his work. One of Congo's paintings sold for US$25,000. Salvador Dali declared: ''The hand of the chimpanzee is quasihuman; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!"

Since Congo's heyday, other chimpanzees have taken an interest in artwork. One of them, named Cheeta, did a lot of paintings during his Palm Springs retirement from acting in the Tarzan movies. He took pride in his work, signing it with a fingerprint. 

Further reading

More about Cheeta at this link (scroll way down).   

Image of chimp painting from Creative Thinking

Other images from "Chimpanzees as Artists" on Artist's Ezine

Previously on GurneyJourney: 

Chimp and Elephant Art (videos and samples), "Gorilla Portraits", "Animals are not Fauvists"

Morris's book: The Biology of Art: A Study of the Picture-Making Behaviour of the Great Apes and Its Relationship to Human Art

Thanks, Richard Roth

Vibert's Cardinals

While we wait for the cardinals at the Vatican to make up their minds about the new Pope, let's enjoy some paintings by Jehan Georges Vibert (French, 1842-1902).

Vibert was known for his gently satirical portraits of ecclesiastical life. This one is called "The Preening Peacock." Vibert entered the École des Beaux-Arts at age sixteen and then studied with the painter François-Edouard Picot. 

Here is "Cardinal by the Fire." In addition to being accomplished both in oil and watercolor, Vibert wrote a book about the science of painting, mostly about pigments and chemistry. He was also a dramatist, and wrote  several plays.

And he loved to dress up. At one ball hosted by the dealer Goupil, "He dressed up as a very convincing Napoléon I with an entourage, including Detaille as the duc de Reichstadt. When Vibert came face to face with his 'descendant,' Napoléon III, in the person of the painter Jundt, they proceeded to decorate everyone in sight, including the waiters, before ending the evening with a remarkable quadrille."

 "Emancipation."
There was an exhibition of his work twenty years ago called "Cavaliers and Cardinals: Nineteenth Century French Anecdotal Paintings," which featured Vibert, Bargue, Meissonier, and Detaille. You can still find used copies of the exhibit catalog, which is the best recent source for biographical information about Vibert.

"The Diet."

Vibert's paintings were very popular with American collectors such as John Jacob Astor and William Vanderbilt. According to Wikipedia, "A large collection of works by Vibert was amassed by the heiress May Louise Maytag on behalf of then bishop of Miami Coleman Carroll, who greatly fancied them. This large cache was then donated to the Florida seminary St. John Vianney College in Miami. At this location the extremely impressive collection has had a somewhat checkered conservation history, as well as exhibition history due to the discomfiture of later bishops with the seeming anti-clericalism of the paintings."

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More about that Miami collection from "Beached Miami's" Jordan Melnick (posted today) Thanks JeanPaul Mallozzi.

Wikipedia on Vibert

Book: Cavaliers and Cardinals: Nineteenth-Century French Anecdotal Paintings

Free Google eBook: "The Science of Painting" by Vibert 

There's a Vibert painting of Gulliver in my book Imaginative Realism.

Painterly drawing

Here's a pencil drawing of a man standing by Joseph Christian Leyendecker (American, born in Germany, 1874–1951) 12 1/2 x 9 5/16 inches, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

The drawing is built from patches of tone made of parallel diagonal strokes. This way of drawing creates a relaxed, impressionistic effect. The white spaces between the strokes keep it open and airy.

Another master of this method is the Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860-1920), who made many portrait etchings in addition to his famous oil paintings. Instead of using lines to outline the form in the usual sense, he achieved a painterly treatment and a sense of atmosphere by organizing his parallel strokes in broad, sweeping movements. 

Another example is American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944). This pen and ink drawing shows a voter's reaction to the news the morning after the election. The eyes, hands, and mouth are just suggested, leaving a lot to the viewer's imagination.

All of these artists probably took some inspiration from banknote engraving and wood engraving, both of which use sections of parallel lines to build up larger tones. When pen and ink drawings could be photomechanically reproduced, it brought about a flowering in the art of the pen.

This way of drawing might also be called called "painterly" or "impressionistic." This term fits not only because the patches of parallel strokes suggest big strokes of a bristle brush, but also because it exemplifies one of the fundamental doctrines of impressionist painting during this period, namely the preference of broad optical effects over a delineation of form and substance.

The goal of the artist was to concentrate on the representation of the appearance of an object. As Sir Edmund Gosse puts it, "The picture was to be a consistent vision, a reproduction of the area filled by the eye. Hence in a very curious way, the aspect of a substance became much more real to [the artist] than the subject itself."
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Further exploration:
Other artists to look at for painterly drawing:
Stanislaw Bohusz-Siestrzencewicz (Polish, 1869-1927)

Franklin Booth (American)
and Chinese / Russian academic drawing
Previously on GurneyJourney: Line Direction, Banknote engraving, and Wood engraving

More online samples of Zorn's art at Anders Zorn.org 
Wikipedia on Gibson and Leyendecker

Book: J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist
Book: ANDERS ZORN: A European Artist Seduces America
Book: The Gibson Girl and Her America: The Best Drawings

Early spring at the farm

Yesterday at the farm was the warmest day so far this year. The four draft horses were out in the barnyard soaking up the sun and munching their hay. Patches of snow still lingered in the shadows, but everywhere else the ground had thawed into mud and manure under their big hooves.

The horses looked up when they heard a commotion coming from the pond.  They walked to the water's edge to see what was wrong. 

Two Canada geese were loudly squawking and flapping from the middle of the water. The geese had landed in the center of the pond, not realizing it was still covered with a thin layer of ice. They tried to walk on the surface of the ice, but it was rotten and they broke through. They couldn't swim out and they couldn't take off and fly either. So they fussed and flapped until they finally broke a passage through the ice and made it to the shore. 

Turk the and the other horses quietly watched this drama unfold. Then he went back to digesting his hay and dozing in the sunshine. 

Documentary on sign painters

SIGN PAINTERS (OFFICIAL TRAILER) from samuel j macon on Vimeo.
(Direct link to video) Directors Faythe Levine and Sam Macon documented the stories of sign painters who still follow the traditional methods of lettering by hand. Here's the trailer for their documentary "Sign Painters," the first anecdotal history of the craft, featuring the stories of more than two dozen sign painters, young and old, working throughout the United States.

"There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade."

Book related to the project: Sign Painters by Faythe Levine
Documentary website: signpaintermovie.com
Previously on GurneyJourney: "Hand Painted Signs" and "Irish Hand Painted Signs"
Documentary "Up There" about artists who paint murals on buildings (thanks, Marney Morris)
There are several Flickr groups devoted to this subject:
“Hand-Painted Signs of the World.”
“Folk Typography”
“Signpaintr,” dedicated to the lost art of hand-lettering
“Hand-Painted Signs of Cambodia.”

Briclot and Banyai on Exhibition

 There's an exhibition of the work of French fantasy artist Aleksi Briclot called "Genèse: des croquis à l’œuvre" ("Genesis: From Sketches to Masterpiece,") at the Maison d' Ailleurs, in Yverdon, Switzerland through August 25. The show focuses on the growth and development of Briclot's images through various techniques.

And opening today at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts is "Istvan Banyai: Stranger in a Strange Land." Hungarian-born Banyai's illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The New York Times,  and many other publications. The Banyai exhibition continues through May 5.

Repin's Cossacks, reenacted as a tableau vivant

Petro Choma and his pals re-enact Ilya Repin's painting "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire" as a tableau vivant.

Kai Margrander's Favorite Things

The print edition of Glamour magazine in Germany regularly asks its editors where they have been getting inspiration lately. This time it was fashion designer Kai Margrander's turn. 

He mentioned the book The Great Gatsby, the Café de Flore in Paris, his Morgan silk jacket....and Dinotopia. He says: "On a stroll through Tumblr, I discovered the whimsical fantasy paintings of the 54-year-old U.S. illustrator. One of his favorite subjects: dinosaurs."

Mr. Margrander's other favorite things include his garden in Lower Bavaria, the song "Nagh el Borda" by Oum Kalthoum, Star Wars, and the word "Absolutely!"
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Thanks, Mr. Margrander! Kai Margrander's blog: "The Talented Mr. M"
Courtesy of the print edition of Glamour magazine, German edition, February 2013 issue.
The original painting of "Garden of Hope" is still on view through March 13 in New Hampshire.