Did Renaissance painters 'cheat' with optical aids? - Samuel Reich, NewScientist

"IT IS one of the most provocative suggestions in art history: did some Renaissance artists use lenses or mirrors to help them paint more accurately? Analysis of a 16th-century artwork dubbed a "Rosetta stone" for optical techniques suggests they did.

The theory that Renaissance artists used optical projection was proposed in 2000 by artist David Hockney and optical scientist Charles Falco of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Most art historians have yet to be convinced..."  - Samuel Reich, New Scientist

Link Full Text, Samuel Reich, "Did Renaissance painters cheat with optical aids?", New Scientist
Image: Lorenzo Lotto, Husband and Wife, Oil, 1523, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton Univeristy

"I dream of it."  - Yo-Yo Ma

Mission: The Lewis Center for the Arts is designed to put the creative and performing arts at the heart of the Princeton experience. This mission is based on the conviction that exposure to the arts, particularly to the experience of producing art, helps each of us to make sense of our life and the lives of our neighbors.

The Lewis Center for the Arts will allow Princeton to fully engage with a range of programs that integrate the creative and performing arts into a broad liberal arts education. The Center will give a new focus and force to the Programs in Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, and Visual Arts, as well as to Film and Video, Musical Performance and to the Princeton Atelier. It will also have close links to the Center for African American Studies, School of Architecture, Department of Art and Archaeology, Council of the Humanities, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English, Department of Music, Princeton University Art Museum and the McCarter Theatre Center.

Link Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University

Raoul Middleman - Painter

Irrepressibly enthusiastic about his art, Middleman is steeped in the roots of the imagery of Western painting. His tumultuous canvases with their splashing brushstrokes -- landscapes, seascapes, portraits, still life’s or narratives -- each one conveys his sense of joy and pleasure in its creation. Middleman explores the whole range of the painter’s art. His portraits -- perverse and confrontational -- take as their subjects his family, friends, neighbors, street people, pulling truths from these faces his subjects may not have known were there. His landscapes are like cantatas composed of painterly fugues of light and shadow, line and color. He’s painted the French countryside, the Cape Cod seacoast, the farmlands of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Tramping around the Baltimore harbor area for most of his adult life he finds beauty in rotting wharves, abandoned factories, rusted oil tanks. The thread that holds this explosion of productivity together is the joy he encounters in his work.

His landscapes are inherently unstructured. They are given a meaning by their treatment: what is selected as a motif, the sense of near and far, the path the eye takes through space, how the light fails, how the air envelops, how the frame is filled -- and first and foremost how the brushstroke picks out the contrasts, opacities, and transparencies -- what shines and what is shaded.

Middleman’s work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, among many others. - Kouros Gallery

Link Slide Show, Raoul Middleman at Work
Link Raoul Middleman web site
Link Kouros Gallery, NYC

National Gallery of Art - Quick Takes

Descent from the Cross, Rembrandt Workshop, Oil/Linen, 1650/52, NGA


Adoration of the Magi, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Tempera/Wood, 1440/1460, NGA


The Kitchen Maid, Chardin, Oil/Linen, 1738, NGA

On Sunday, I went to the National Gallery of Art - West Building. These are some of my observations.

The Rembrandt paintings express such a broad range of thought and feeling - like life. Regardless of subject matter, he seems to consistently explore a portraiture of sorts. During this visit, I thought about the connections between the way he thinks about the head and the way he approaches landscape and narrative. I think his deep understanding of the head infuses his work with unrivaled emotional depth and awareness. I look at his work as often as possible and each time experience something different and new.

This time, the Italians offered me a fresh look at the round format. Aware of linear perspective and yet unencumbered by it, they freely altered scale to better express their ideas. A meaningful composition in the round reveals a more obvious relation between the composition and format and helps deepen my understanding of composition in general.

Looking at the space in the Chardin paintings was a remarkable visual experience. Instead of receding pictorial depth, his space seemed to also press forward - almost bubble towards the viewer. Two paintings - The Kitchen Maid and The Attentive Nurse - defy obvious and predictable pictorial space. In both, especially The Kitchen Maid, the figure seems to be on the verge of falling head first out of the painting. He is a genius at pictorial tension and balance.

What marvelous teachers!

Link National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Notan: Design in Light and Dark - Sharon Himes

Grande Odalisque, Ingres, 1814, The Louvre, Paris, France

"What is dark is not light and what is light is not dark. This is the basis of all design and an important guiding principle of art. It seems so simple but an artist can spend a lifetime exploring the possibilities of light and dark.

"Notan" is the term used by the Japanese to express "light-dark" as an element of design. In the west we use separate terms such as positive space and negative space, dividing the idea of light-dark into separate components. On paper it is easy to see that dark shapes cannot exist without a surrounding area of white. White shapes cannot exist without dark to define it. The two elements are really one. This is an eastern concept of yin-yang that each is what the other is not...

...All art is based on light and dark even when color is involved. In a low-light situation we can only see the values, or light and dark of a painting. Hang a painting in a dim room and only the strongest contrasts of light and dark can be identified. These abstract forms of light and dark tell us a lot about the art, even when we are not immediately aware of a specific subject or scene. It is the design of the art that we see when color, texture and representation are set aside.

Simple elements of light and dark can be expressive. When limited to the basic characteristics of black and white on a two dimensional plane, design still can express tension, movement and balance. Edges between light and dark catch our attention and we unconsciously follow them with our eyes. A gently curving edge is followed slowly by our eyes and a more sharply curved edge is passed over quickly, giving a subconscious sense of movement. Convoluted edges can suggest texture or just be confusing.

The original painting (above) is relatively large, and such a small computer image can not begin to show the probable depth of texture or intensity of color. It is always best to see an original painting but viewing a representation on a computer has its values.

Light spaces within an area of dark or dark spots in a light shape change the balance. Like dark windows on a light house or light bubbles in a dark liquid, the main shape is alleviated by the disruption.

A design shows balance or imbalance (tension) through the distribution of light and dark space. Rarely is the artist likely to divide the space perfectly evenly as that would be static and uninteresting. Dividing the space into areas of light and dark that are uneven suggests interaction and movement..."

Link Full Text, Sharon Himes, artcafe.net

NYT Exhibition Review: 'Charles Addams's New York', The Perverse Pleasures Underneath the Ordinary

Charles Addams

Who could resist such an invitation? The city street is dark and deserted. The buildings are empty. There are no witnesses. A lone man carrying a briefcase, after a long day at the office perhaps, approaches a subway staircase. Out of the subterranean gloom, a giant human hand protrudes, its index finger beckoning the office worker, inviting him into the depths. His eyes are wide with astonishment, his face showing the hint of a grin, as if the bizarre, illicit invitation were not entirely unwelcome... Edward Rothstein, NY Times, March 4, 2010

Link Full Text, Edward Rothstein, NY Times, March 4, 2010

“Charles Addams’s New York” is on view through May 16 at the Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street; (212) 534-1672, mcny.org.

Did Monet Invent Abstract Art? - The Daily Beast

"An enlightening new exhibition in Madrid traces Claude Monet’s influence on
Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter and other abstract masters."

Link The Daily Beast