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4/26/07

Cool sites

http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/about.html

3/19/07

I have been thinking a lot about reality and representations of reality. We all went to the Rembrandt exhibit at the Phoenix Museum of Art last month but it probably all started with housecleaning. I have a lot of fabrics and fabric storage is messy. I'm always looking for a system. Some quilters advocate cutting little squares and storing them in sealed in plastic envelopes as an index. It doesn't work for me because I have to feel the texture and the hand to know whether the fabric in question is suitable for a given project. The organization books also recommend taking pictures of keepsakes and then discarding the keepsake. Also doesn't work because the photographic representation is just another "thing", it's not a replacement for the "thing". It's a separate thing in itself that now needs it's own storage. As you can see, even before the Rembrandt show I was thinking about representations of reality, good and bad. Some of the Dutch contemporaries of Rembrandt painted incredible landscapes. They were more real than photographs. After the Rembrandt we went to the ballgown exhibit, which had gowns and photographs of gowns and a slide show on a computer screen of more gowns. The fabric depicted in the Dutch paintings was more like actual fabric than the photographs in the ballgown exhibit. This was really noticeable because you could see the picture of the dress and the dress itself side by side. I left the Rembrandt exhibit thinking "How did they do that? Why is a painting more like reality than an actual good photograph of that reality?" There was some discussion of using brushstrokes to create real texture to simulate fabric, but in the pictures that I found most real there were no visible brushstrokes. The painting was extremely flat and even, the impression however was of real velvet unlike an equally flat photograph of velvet. How?

This all lead me to think about art used to depict reality for commercial or educational purposes, i.e. illustration. Photographs have largely replaced illustration for science books and similar purposes. However, on a really simplistic level, I've had many birdwatchers tell me that they prefer the Golden Guide to Birds of North America with it's drawings to the photographs in the Audubon book. By definition the photographs should be more accurate. But actually, they aren't. The real birds look more like the drawings than photographs of actual birds. So I wonder, how much have we given up by accepting photographs as more "accurate" than skilled drawing and painting?

With this on my mind I was really cheered to find that Smithsonian was also concerned about this and formed the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators in 1968.