February 27, 2023
"The goal is not to expose the 'slipups' of the masters but to understand the human brain."
I'm reading "The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries" (The MIT Press Reader).
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I would have liked more discussion of underpainting in connection with getting shadows right. It's a Renaissance-era technique, but I think if you're trying to get shadows right across different colours/materials in oil painting (vs say watercolour) it's essential. Without it, it's a lot of trouble to match tone (I say, as an amateur who has always struggled to match tone in practice after doing an underpainting). And I don't know how widespread use of underpainting to capture light and shadow tone was over time.
The Shadow knows!
So long as they're all going in the same direction, that's good enough.
Coping for how badly modern art compares to people that never saw an electronic device in their imaginations let alone in their lives.
Women believe that light goes from the eye to the object it's looking at, as with men staring at breasts.
In Suite 347 Picasso even drew in the dotted lines of the male gaze.
Fabulous!! This is why Althouse is often just the best blogger around.
Wonderful stuff, non-political and not a single mention of the shadow cast, or not cast, by Donald Trump.
I love it!!!
The very first example, of Masaccio, was so unpersuasive to my eyes that I gave up reading further into their painful, deadened prose. Which was sometimes so unclear, one might call it shadowy.
In the tropics, the sun appears directly overhead semi-annually at solar noon. (In Hawaii, the only US state in the tropics, this is referred to as Lahaina noon). At that point in time, objects oriented perpendicular to the flat ground (e.g., a signpost or flagpole) will cast no shadow.
When you see photos of such objects lacking shadows, your brain senses something is not quite right with the photograph. It seems that someone has photoshopped the object into the picture, disregarding the 'need' to add shadow to make it seems realistic.
Correlations inferred at The Twilight Fringe. That said, science cannot discern origin and expression.
Reader's Digest version: Shadows are hard.
This is one of the reasons that Ray Tracing in computer graphics works well: shadows. And also, why is looks odd to our eyes. It provides much more realistic shadows, at the cost of need to be way more computationally precise and really freaking nit picky about material and surface properties. Radiousity is another computer lighting model that handles diffuse lighting, and is also a combination of more accurate an more odd looking. A combination of ray-tracing an radiousity is approaching photo-realistic, for some definition of approaching (note: this is for completely calculated / generated scenes, not alterete image / photoshopped / texture mapped, a whole ‘nother topic)
This is very interesting.
As someone who took a lot of drawing classes in college, shadows can be tough to do.
Easiest if done in charcoal...
Thank goodness we don't live on some sci-fi planet with two suns.
The horror...
With two suns, I suspect that drawing shadows might be the least of our worries...
If IRCC from my Art History courses, Renaissance artists often arranged their compositions to
encourage the viewer's gaze to move in desired directions, in order to increase the painting's dramatic effect.
Accurately depicting shadows might easily derail that process. That applies in particular to the Massaccio. The Kuwahars simulation seems to be a good example of that happening.
And, ferchrissake, they're paintings, not accurate depictions of reality!
If IRCC from my Art History courses, Renaissance artists often arranged their compositions to
encourage the viewer's gaze to move in desired directions, in order to increase the painting's dramatic effect.
Accurately depicting shadows might easily derail that process. That applies in particular to the Massaccio. The Kuwahara simulation that folows it seems to be a good example of that happening.
And, ferchrissake, they're paintings, not accurate depictions of reality!
Thanks for a great read!
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