Ingres’ painting, La grande Odalisque, is the image that comes to mind for most people when they see the word, and usually assume that the artist was representing a harem concubine. Maybe he thought that he was, but “odalisque” is a French transliteration of the Turkish word “odaliq,” a slave servant in the harem, not [more...]
The recent theft of paintings from the Paris Museum of Modern Art which included works by Picasso and Matisse, will concern all gallery owners and private collectors. Stolen works of art and antiques often disappear never to be seen again, or if they do re-emerge, it is often several years later. In an attempt to [more...]
Look at Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s designs for furnishings, textiles, stained glass etc. and it won’t be long before you see a characteristic rose: typically pink, and less symmetrical than classic rose motifs. The petals often have strong outlines, perhaps the leading of stained glass, or the white space of a stencilled image. Is it right [more...]
I have only once in my life created graffiti. in 1980, a friend and I were visiting Melbourne where the City Council had just installed a public graffiti wall. We thought this was a great idea, so we bought a couple of cans of spray paint and set to work on our masterpiece. We were [more...]
Steampunk is a label applied to a certain form of literature, and also to the subculture that has arisen from it. Before we go further, let’s deal with the “punk” part. “Punk” is just a naming hook that pigeonholes steampunk as a literary movement by analogy with cyberpunk. The “punk” hook, perhaps originally a cheeky [more...]
Perhaps surprisingly, book cover illustrations don’t go back very far. Not so long ago, before the 1820s, books were usually sold without any cover. Just a stack of unbound printed sheets. You would then go to a bookbinder and commission a binding and cover. Books were expensive, and the additional cost of a hand-crafted binding [more...]
Polaroid cameras produce self-developing photos, so that you can see the photo within a minute or so. The technology was developed by Edwin Land in the 1940s. The cameras and film were sold by his Polaroid Corporation, and later by others. The earliest of these cameras, the Polaroid Land Camera, used rolls of film and [more...]
Primary colors are the colors we mix to produce all the other colors. Because there are different ways to do the mixing, we need different sets of primary colors. The primary colors of light are needed when we are mixing different colored light together. This is done in a computer monitor (whether using LCD technology, [more...]
Fractal art is art by formula — literally. The dictionary definition of a fractal (short for fractional dimension) is a geometrical shape that is repeated at ever smaller intervals, so that even small portions of it are similar in appearance to the whole. Although there are naturally appearing fractals (for example, a map of a [more...]
The curious notion of life imitating art was expressed by Oscar Wilde as “Life imitates art, more than art imitates life“. It’s a turnaround from the usual situation in which the artist creates art inspired by the life and world around them. When life imitates art, reality reflects what had previously been expressed in art [more...]
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, also known as High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI), is a way to combine multiple photographs of the same scene into a single photo that has better brightness detail. The technique can be used to produce more realistic photographs, or it can be used to produce surreal photographs which look like [more...]