I think it's the kind of essays that are in the "not even wrong realm", that yet manages to pull anyone reading this in the wrong direction.
I'm not an artist even though I spend quite some time painting, so that may be the reason for my difference of interpretation.
>the prayer beads seem uncannily real [...] Van Eyck must have spent days to stare at them (shortened)
Of course not. By the time he painted that, he was an accomplished painter. Therefore, he knew already (formally or not) to look at specular highlights, reflected lights, how the shadow works, etc. At some point, you could reduce all of the observation to light interacting with material. But like you do with math, you have a reduced number of special cases for which you can remember the result without deriving each individual steps.
>It’s longer than a normal human neck!
It's a kind of weird fetishization of "master artists". Any mistake they can make is an incredible deliberate choice.
The people who say that generally would not be able to distinguish a 'master painting' from other paintings from the same era by 'minor artists'.
They can only everything through the prism of what their art history book tell them they should think.
Why is the perspective wrong on the scallop shell, what is the statement for the sea looking like a wallpaper? Did Botticelli never see the sea before painting it?
Then going to Van Gogh. There is no consistent theory that makes a Boticelli "good" and both Van Gogh paintings "good". They obey entirely different concepts of what "art" is supposed to be.
The part about explaining how to build up concepts in programming seems way more interesting, but it seems to me that it would be much be without the analogy with art that is built upon layers of misunderstanding. To me this is exactly the kind of mental burden that I had to painfully unlearn before I could start improving in the ways of art, and reconstruct a mental model of how things actually work.
> Any mistake [master artists] can make is an incredible deliberate choice.
yeah really, my experience as an artist[1] is about 50% "I am gonna deliberately draw this lady with exaggerated proportions" and about 50% more like "aww shit I got really into some parts of this piece and only just now realized how much I fucked up these underlying proportions, and I really like some of the bits I already did too much to throw it away, how can I make it work".
Digital tools make it easier to deal with the second case, "lemme just grab this head and move it down a bit" is infinitely easier in Photoshop than on canvas.
1: I've paid my bills with art since ~2000, and I've worked under people who were definitely masters of their craft, and I have seen the exact same "shit I fucked this up how can I make this work, okay this looks kinda cool now and it reads as a stylistic decision instead of a mistake" behavior in their drawings.
Thanks for the dissection, I really agree there's far too much uncritical adulation of 'art' - "famous person did this so it's very good, and don't contradict". I think art is a personal thing, a matter of taste, yet somehow you're not allowed to judge against.
This slobbering gush of praise may be right or it may not, but I feel I'm being battered into agreeing.
> To me this is exactly the kind of mental burden that I had to painfully unlearn before I could start improving in the ways of art, and reconstruct a mental model of how things actually work.
Light strikes objects in a scene; generally speaking, at each illuminated point reflected light radiates away in all directions, a sphere (subject to caveats: occlusion, unequal strength in all directions). Rays from each point reach the viewer's eyes, where the lenses of the eye project the image onto the retina. This image is then interpreted by the brain.
To create an image, you are doing one of two things: either you take this three-dimensional scene, project it onto an imaginary two-dimensional plane in front of the viewer, and render a (generally planar) artifact which reflects similar colors and light -- that is, your painting. (You will be subject to various challenges, like mismatched lighting that reflects from that painting, materials limitations, resolution limitations.)
OR...
Reverse-engineer the brain itself, such that it perceives things in a similar way, despite a difference in the actual rendered image.
This is a well-reasoned criticism; thank you for taking the time to write it.
> Van Eyck must have spent days
I am curious, from your experience, how long do you think it would have taken Van Eyck to get the prayer beads this right?
> It’s longer than a normal human neck
I agree with you that people fetishize master artists. Yet, I think you must also agree that painters often alter reality to achieve an effect. I chose to use the neck as an example, for it's much more likely that he did on this purpose, and it really hit me as a surprise when I first looked at that painting.
> There is no consistent theory that makes a Botticelli "good" and both Van Gogh paintings "good".
The theory I proposed is "what affects humans". This is much fuzzier than mathematical theory, but I think you can judge both works as good, if they affect humans as the artists intended.
--
If you have suggestions for books that explore painting, less from an art history perspective, and more from a painter's perspective, would love em!
Someone else mentioned that artists at the time would have made studies (nature morte) so that they already know how to paint these objects.
For the time itself, it depends on how fast he worked, etc. So I have no idea unless the process was documented.
A Chinese painter I know says his master spent one month in the mountain studying monkeys, and after that he only needed a glimpse to capture the image of one in full details. I think what matters here is that with time, your brain learns to reduce the complexity of the domain. In doing so you just have to remember a few key points (skull shape, expression, ...) that will capture the whole, most of "a monkey" being similar to another monkey, so you can reconstruct the missing pieces. Of course, a monkey is a tremendously complicated object compared to a set of glass beads, since there are many more dimensions (hairy, young, fur color, ...).
For mistakes of breaking the rules, I agree that it might have been intentional. Maybe he just made a gesture, found it to be good, and disregarded the anatomical accuracy. I was not intimate with him, so I wouldn't know. Many famous examples were not accepted as such a famous critic of the "Grande Odalisque" claimed she had three additional vertebrae compared to a normal human. Who has the best sensibility, the one who admires the painting nonetheless, or the one who sees a deformed human?
I don't know "what affects humans", or how that could separate "art" from "anything else".
It did not affect contemporaries of Van Gogh, and most people who are affected by it are so after having been immersed in a culture claiming it is high-art, or facing ridicule as uneducated rubes. I believe most of the time this actually means "has some market value".
For a reference from a painter's perspective, James Gurney's "Color and light - a guide for the realist painter" is probably the current standard.
Noted for the reference, will look deeper. I also reached out to a few specialists , to get a sense for how long the prayer beads would have taken. I am genuinely curious. Thanks for your thoughts.
> It did not affect contemporaries of Van Gogh, and most people who are affected by it are so after having been immersed in a culture claiming it is high-art, or facing ridicule as uneducated rubes. I believe most of the time this actually means "has some market value".
I agree that there's a lot of strutting in art, but I think this is too cynical of an assessment. This kind of argument can be made for books, obtuse mathematical works (Principia Mathematica, 1980s AI, etc), and the new programming paradigm du jour. Eventually critics and contemporaries die, and time begins to tell what was truly exceptional and what wasn't. I would bet Van Gogh falls into the great camp; but we'll see for sure in a few more centuries.
I spoke with a conservator at the gallery. He says that indeed the beads likely didn't take too long to put to the canvas. Hey may have looked at them a while, but at least the process of transferring them to the canvas was quick.
I've edited this section. You have made the essay stronger. Thank you!
> how long do you think it would have taken Van Eyck to get the prayer beads this right?
Not the parent poster, but: check out some YouTube videos on realistic painting. A professional artist would probably get them to 90% finished in like an hour or so with some fine tuning later.
It doesn’t have to be perfect raycasting, it just has to be convincing/good enough.
>the prayer beads seem uncannily real [...] Van Eyck must have spent days to stare at them (shortened)
Of course not. By the time he painted that, he was an accomplished painter. Therefore, he knew already (formally or not) to look at specular highlights, reflected lights, how the shadow works, etc. At some point, you could reduce all of the observation to light interacting with material. But like you do with math, you have a reduced number of special cases for which you can remember the result without deriving each individual steps.
>It’s longer than a normal human neck!
It's a kind of weird fetishization of "master artists". Any mistake they can make is an incredible deliberate choice. The people who say that generally would not be able to distinguish a 'master painting' from other paintings from the same era by 'minor artists'. They can only everything through the prism of what their art history book tell them they should think. Why is the perspective wrong on the scallop shell, what is the statement for the sea looking like a wallpaper? Did Botticelli never see the sea before painting it?
Then going to Van Gogh. There is no consistent theory that makes a Boticelli "good" and both Van Gogh paintings "good". They obey entirely different concepts of what "art" is supposed to be.
The part about explaining how to build up concepts in programming seems way more interesting, but it seems to me that it would be much be without the analogy with art that is built upon layers of misunderstanding. To me this is exactly the kind of mental burden that I had to painfully unlearn before I could start improving in the ways of art, and reconstruct a mental model of how things actually work.