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B) Pick one of his images and comment on it

As you can see in this ia a painting created by J.M.W turner, he focused on capturing the feeling of destruction and chaos, he used the colors of red and orange to add to the emotion and you can vaguely see a boat being destroyed to give that sense of chaos. 

3) What artist movement were trying to capture a feeling of experience rather then to achieve accurate depiction?

  • The fist art movement that focused on capturing the feeling of a painting was called impressionism, impressionism first originated by a small group of French artist in early 19th century. 

 

      1) What was the first of the reasons artist stopped focusing on realism?
  • The reason why many artists stopped focusing on realism is because due to the first partially successful photograph invented by ‘luis dagauerre’ in the 1837. This lead to the realistic painting industry to fall due to people taking photos rather than getting there portraits painted

 

      

Unit 3 introductions to critical contextual awareness in art and design

 

 

 

 

B) Choose an image on this movement and comment on it?

 

  • This painting ‘impression sunrise, was painted by msuee monet, this was known a the painting that gave its name to the style,

 

4) What did Cezanne say that everything could be reduced?

 

  • The artist Cezanne was known as the bridge between impressionisms and cubism. He once said that everything can be reduced to geometric shapes

 

B) Choose an image of his and comment on it?

 

  • This painting was done by cezanne, as you can see the house and trees is not photo realistic, in fact everything is a different geometric shape, he uses very bright colors adding the feeling warmth and comfort like what you feel at a summer holiday 

5) Cubism is meant to enable you to see multiple viewpoints at once. Find a Cubist image by Picasso and comment on it whether this seems true?

 

  • I think that Picasso cubist portraits does give that sense different and multiple viewpoints, the shapes gives this paintings  face has a 3d look toit, so much that as I it looks like a 3d model but still looks flat .              

  • Some of the shapes are different shades and colors giving it a sense of depth you can see on the left side of the  face, the light yelllow shapes giving the affect of her face curving around to a different angle of his face.

 

        you can see the shapes over and cross over each over giving this             angle 3d shape look giving the portrait depth. 

6) Find 3 Photorealistic images and comment on their look and development?

  • This is photo realistic image of Angelina Jolie. I you can see the artist have definitely got the painting accurate and extremely realistic, looking at the skin and the features of the face you can barely tell it a painting. Looking at the neck and the hair and the back the hair you can tell can see and pick up the lack of detail and texture also hair at the bottom starts to fade and get lighter. The development on the shows great detail, as you can see the artist has the very faint lighting and the very small creases in the lip which not would not be noticed often. The artist, Wayne Forest also known as GMesh took a photo of Angelina Jolie and recreated it using related in Illustrator CS2 using G-Mesh, pen and feathering for some of the hair. This piece took him around 24 hours to complete.

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  • This is a photorealistic painting of a young woman. The look of this painting is very sleek and smooth, the skin and features are accurate and have this soft feel to it, just like real skin does.                                                                                                                           

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  • The ponytail at the back, does have a lack of detail and is can tell it’s a painting, the clothes across her arm looks realistic but the shadowing contrast to much, this could be due to the lighting of the actual photo. Also the lips have this look of a painting because on the creases in the lip is too bold and dark.

  •                                                                                                                     The artist, Wayne Forest also known as GMesh took a photo of the actress xia zhang and recreated in Illustrator CS2 using mesh and some pen. He called this piece ‘the day dreamer’ 

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  • This painting of Morgan freeman is the most accurately photorealistic of the three, it has a very real look to it as if it’s coming out of the image. Very minor details such as small lone strands of hair and the lighting showing the skin texture and sweat adds to realism of the paining, the hair is very detailed and had the fluffy look that real hair has, and the detail of the fabric on his collar is extremely accurate. The eyes shadowing has a weird blue highlight them, but lighting on the skin is very detailed and has small details such as how the lighting in the side of his forehead is not just white but still has the skin tone under it gives the painting a photorealistic look. For the development of this painting the artist Kyle lambert used an ipad and the application Procreate. He started with a blank page, quickly painted the broad strokes

    with his finger. Then she reduced the brush size to a few pixels, pinched to zoom, and carefully painted in the fine details. The painting is made up of around 285,000 brush strokes and took around 200 hours to complete 

Essay

Did the invention of the camera kill art?

In 1837 artist and chemist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented the first photographic process. Using his process named the daguerreotype, he created the first ever photograph titled L'Atelier de l'artiste. This came widely used by people who would before pay artist to record portraits of them, due to the fact that the process captured a more accurate images in shorter amount of time. This led artists to question their role, whether they should still focus on trying to capture an image or scene in a realistic way. In this essay I will exploring the question if the camera did kill art and the artist movement of that time and will be using evidence from the movement of arts thought history.

 

Due to the fact that the many artists had to rethink their role, forcing them to change their perspective on what ‘Art’ is, I think that the camera did not kill art, that artists just adapted their approach. Many movements of art were born through this change of mindset showing that art was not stopped by the invention of the camera, that artist had to adapt the focus, evolving art to where it has lead to today.

 

An early example of this was the artist J. M. W Turner who was the first to  focus on capturing the feeling of the scene than recording them accurately. He would paint shipwrecks and natural phenomena’s only indicating objects' with broad brushstrokes to capture the dramatic effects, capturing the essence of the scene. Turner style contrasted  the focus of realism art, before the camera, it shows the earliest signs of arts evolution, changing the way people viewed art and what saw as good.

 

Then art returned back to focusing on realism. In the early 1970's the movement photorealism was a counter response to abstract impressionism, once again artists have returned to focusing on realism. Although there are differences between the era's: before the early 1830's they focused on portraits of kings on horses portraits, while in the early 1970's they focused on very obscure objects like bottles or common objects people see daily. 

 

I think that not only art has returned to realism, but with the use of technology like cameras,  artist has improved on capturing images realistically. Looking at work from artists like Chuck Close, his work looks extremely realistic, he captured small obscure details that a camera picks up,  that the human eye does not. He shows the ability to realistically capture details like sweat which was not seen in older paintings.

Another reason why realism art had improved is because artists were using lenses (camera obscurer) to help trace realistic  scenes, they would use these devices to project the image and draw details like reflection on a object or window which the human eye would not pick up. But as technology advanced and the camera was able to pick up more subtle details, realism art become more realistic.

 

By looking at the history of art and it movements, we can see that art did not die when camera was invented, it just moved into a different direction, moving to an emotion capturing style. But eventually it came back to focusing on realism. Ultimately, I think that the invention of the camera improves realism art and made it more realistic . 

2) Who was the first artist to focus on capturing emotion and light in a painting rather than realism?
  • The first artist to focus on capturing emotion and light within a photo was J.M.W turner 

As you can see it does not focus on being realistic, you can see the simple brush stokes that vaguely represent certain objects like the boat. He has used the colors and the shades of blue to capture the emotion of loneliness and a quite sad emotion. 

 

Secret History

Essay 

 Is using a lens cheating.  

According to the Hockney falco thesis, famous artists of the 15th century were believed to be using optical aids in order to increase the level of realism in their art pieces. Optical aids such as the camera abscura which was the use of a lenses to project a strong light into a dark room, resulting to a projected image on a canvas, enabling the artist to trace over and get the fine details which would be hard to copy by eye.  Evidence for this could be found in some of art pieces, created by these artists, such as the â€˜The Milkmaid’, 1656-58 by vemeer, you could see optical errors like small blobs of highlights which are only seen when using a projector. Although with the strong evidence that the thesis has supporting it, it’s still a controversial subject but assuming that this is true, In this essay I will be discussing whether the use of these optical aids is cheating or not and giving reasons for my opinion. 

 

Why it is cheating:  

 

One reason to believe why using optical is cheating is due to fact that the artist that were believed to of used these aids kept it secret from the public, there is no information of using optical aids from artists that were believed to use optical aids like caravagio and his piece’ Amor Vincit Omnia’ (1601). The reason they kept this a secret may be because that the position of an artist was a highly paid career, especially for a well-known artist, many wealthy families paid these artist lots of money to produce realistic painting of them in armour or expensive clothing, for them it was a way to flaunt their wealth. If these artists gave their secrets to the public, more people would be too able to produce the same level of realism, creating more competition in the artist industry.  

 

Another reason why it’s cheating is because the use of optical requires less skill and experience in terms of drawing and painting. Evidence used to back up the hockney falco thesis is that the painting looks too good , having very complicated objects drawn close to perfect with no signs of mistakes or guidelines.  

 

Although having the knowledge and understanding of how the optical aids works was a skill in itself-, the artists didn’t need the required skill to achieve the realism they captured if they had to do it by hand and eye. This means that the artists aren’t showing their artistic skill, rather they’re showing another approach to gain that scene of realism, referring back to my first point of the artist knowing that you didn’t need an extreme level of skill in order to trace over the projected scene, giving them more reason to hide it so that people couldn’t recreate the same level of realism.    

 

Why it not:  

 

Reason why it’s not cheating is because if the goal was to get the most realistic painting and that alone then the use of optical aid can be seen as just a tool of achieving the realism. A similar tool and technique is the animation tool rotoscoping, similar to camera obscura, you use a video of someone or something moving,  and trace over it frame by frame in order to capture the same fluidity that object had in the video.  Both rotoscoping and using optical aids could be seen as a tool to achieve a level of quality in its respective field. Although a counter argument could be that rotoscoping still has the creative process of adding character designs over the drawing which requires creativity, while with the painting essentially you’re just tracing and painting over what you see.  

 

In conclusion I think it is cheating due to the fact that the artist kept it secret, knowing that if this was publicly known more people would be seen as competition because of the lack of skill needed to reproduce the realism in the art. Also I think that that the artist didn’t use the tool solely to achieve the best result in the painting, they did it for the recognition and financial perks included with being seen as a very good artist in their era. The reason I’ve come to believe this is because the artist has given no credit to using optical aids, showing that artists wanted people to assume that they themselves did it by eye.  

What is the Hockney -Falco thesis?  

 

The hockney-falco thesis is a theory on art history proposing that Western artist since the Renaissance were using optical  

 Such as the camera obscura and objects that can be used as lenses such as curved mirrors, these optical aids are basically techniques of using equipment such as camera obscura and lenses to project light onto a canvas at an angle in order to capture an scene accurately, allowing an artist to trace over these projections images producing realistic quality painting these seems extremely difficult to accomplish if done by eye.  

 

 

 

What evidence is there to support the theory?  

 

Evidence that support this theory are this such like: the most obvious evidence is the sudden difference of quality of paintings in the 15 century, hockney created a TimeLine of different paintings and organised by time it was created, he found that there was a sudden improvement of quality in artist work in 1500. 

 

 

 

Other reason that support this theory are thing such as, strong lighting in the painting which is needed for the image to be projected on a canvas. Perfectly details of complicated foreshortened objects, which lt would be extremely difficult to recreate by eyeballing the object, also that fact there’s no underdrawings or mistakes in the painting make it even hard to believe it was done by eye.  

 

Another reason is optical errors in the painting where some objects are out of focus, if it was drawn by eye, nothing should be drawn out of focus, due to the fact when looking at something your eyes readjust and never become out of focus. And they had the resources and technology to create a lens to use, such as convex mirrors.  

 

 

As you can see from these two pieces of art, there is an obvious different between the two in terms of realism and quality of detail, the reflection and lighting on the painting on the right looks to be close to perfect, as if I’m looking at the photo with very strong lighting, if the artist of the painting on the right Caravaggio  would have used an optic aid, he would have needed have strong lighting in order to use these optic aids, As for the other painting the only very subtle lighting that looks more to be guessed or not that accurately recorded.   

 

Why I think that this supports the reason is because these painting were created in different century’s, the first one â€˜Michael and the Dragon, Sienese school’ is the 14 century painting and the other Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of St. Peter is 15th , this is the time period where Hockney found a sudden jump of quality in all the paintings being created showing that something new or different must have been used for artist to achieve the realism.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another difference in accuracy of detail are the facial detail expression, the painting on the left has a very plain expression and the facial proportions look incorrect, while Caravaggio's painting had captured that fleeting expression the man’s face,   

 

Choose painting by :Giotto Caravaggio and vemeer. 

analyse the images. Look at he the date and realism of each image, what techniques could have been used to accounts of the in realism?  

As you can see from the two different painting by the artist giotto and Caravaggio have quite a difference in terms of realism, looking at the times these paintings were created relate back to the hockney falco thesis.

 

The theory suggest that artist started using optical some time in the 1500’s they believe this due to the sudden jump of realism in artist work at in this period Giotto work was created in 1320 before the sudden jump and caravagio work was created in the 1600’s after the jump.

 

so these two images fit into the time frames supporting the thisis saying  that they starting using optical aids in the 15 century giving reason why I think that optical aids techniques  such as camera obscura was used in account of for the difference in realism  

Using this theory I think that the two artist used different technique when creating the painting.

 

I think that the taking of the Christ by caravagio used a optical aid as a technuiqe to achieve its realism while the Madonna and child by Giotto has not, evidence that supports this are points made by the hockney falco thesis such as the difference of lighting in the paintings.

 

The lighting in the garrevagio work is very strong, this shows that concentrated light must have been relecfted off the people he was painting, we lead us to believe that he might of used optical aids as strong lighting is needed to project  on a canvas of a lens.  

 

 

(The First painting is: madonna and child by Giotto di bondone  created in 1320)

(The second image is: The taking of Christ by caravagio, created in 1602)

 

Vemeer paintings, The milk maid, also supports why I think the technique that helped artist after the 1500’s improve the realism of their paintings were optical aids. His painting was created in 1656 fitting the time frame that the hockney flasco thesis said when artist used optical aids.  

 

What also shows that Vermeer uses optical aids is the optics errors on the painting shown, you could small blobs highlights and other cirlcles of confusions, these optical errors are only found in projections. This is how they would uses optical aids, by project a light using a lens and onto a canvas. 

 

By looking at the 3 paintings and different in quality you can see the painting by giotto was probably done form eye, but carravagio may have used optical aids as a technique to enhance their work. It is even more apparent in the painting of Vermeer where its shows optical error.  

 

(The third image is: The milk made by Johannes Vermeer 1658)

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