Monday, August 11, 2003

Did Old Masters trace their most famous paintings? Ever go to the Louvre and wonder how the hell Caravaggio made his faces so crazily lifelike? A controversial book suggests that the Old Masters were quietly getting some technological help on the side. Artist David Hockney has a new book -- Secret Knowledge -- that claims da Vinci and his contemporaries were using camera obscuras and mirrors to project their real-life subjects onto the canvas, and then simply tracing the images. As CBS reports: Hockney says it started in Bruges, Belgium, one of Europe's great 15th century commercial centers, where that optical look, a photographic look, first appeared in the works of Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck. “[He was] a painter who knew about optical projections and had looked at them,” says Hockney. “One thing the mirror projections do is project surfaces quite amazingly, especially shiny surfaces. And there's lots of shiny surfaces.” As Hockney points out,... [collision detection] I think that would not make their achievements any less amazing. I read that some of the Flemish masters also shared some of the work, i.e. some painters had a "hand specialist" paint all of the hands for example.... 11:58:43 PM    comment []; Monday More recording by myself in the studio today. I mostly worked on the Solea por Bulerias (usually the first song after the intermission on this tour), which is turning out to my liking. Nice rain in the later afternoon which turned into some serious hail (1/4") for a while. Hail in August - there is a concept I didn't know before I moved to Santa Fe. 11:40:21 PM    comment []; Chinese postcard 11:36:52 PM    comment []; Yohji Runway Tokyo 1991 From L to R: Edgar Winter, Dennis Hopper and OL (w the Champagne glass) 10:43:09 PM    comment [];

© Copyright 2003 Ottmar Liebert. Last update: 9/1/03; 10:38:10 AM.