In 1959, Tide Laundry detergent became their first commercial customer.
But within two years, graphic designer Bob Peak had discovered the paints and used them as rocket fuel.
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| Bob Peak's ad for 7up combined the new colors with cinematic speed effects, bold angles and slashing lines |
Peak set the graphic arts world ablaze in the early 1960s. But some things are too hot not to cool down; like uranium that has passed its half life, the radioactive colors used in some of those early paintings no longer radiate so intensely. This enables us to re-approach the art and analyze the old fashioned drawing underneath.
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| Bob Peak's 7up ad today |
It turns out that the drawing is pretty darn good. It is inventive yet confident. Like so much art that seems wild and spontaneous, beneath the surface it is carefully controlled.
Peak's illustrations wonderfully embodied an exciting moment in time: the radioactive colors of the atomic age, the supersonic speed of the space age, the "intensified" new laundry detergent, and a visual sense that incorporated what the camera lens taught the naked eye about reality.
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| By the 1950s photography had moved past Muybridge |
Underneath the dayglo colors, Peak made images that were every bit as museum worthy as the paintings of Diebenkorn.
Today people continue to invent new pigments, including the new blackest black discovered at MIT, using an arrangement of carbon nanotubes, known as S-VIS.
Where is this generation's Bob Peak, ready to make bold new use of the new pigments and similar new tools?
The quality could be seen before the fading, and the colouring wasn't a necessary 'gimmick'.
ReplyDeleteBut would it have lost anything from using a traditional cadmium or something at a comparable strength, other than the dayglo novelty ?
Similarly with the new blacks, hadn't heard of them.
The only issues with blacks, or the main ones - I think - are their setting and surface - reflection, and so on . And fading, sinking, etc., issues.
Normally you're trying to balance darks carefully rather than going for deep blacks. In pure black on white drawing you don't want or need the polarity any greater than it already is, which is tricky enough with getting what you're able to show against what you have to forfeit.
So deep, dark blacks might only be called for in situations where there are other really deep or dark tones or colours you want to use that can receive emphasis for our eyes through the contrast....maybe I'm missing something ?
If any part if the scale needed stretching, I would have thought people would be looking at the whites, to try to make it a little more like light.
But hardly necessary, either - work is usually within relation, relative scales...this has hardly been exhausted; if anything, people have lost their sensitivities to subtleties and this seems to be increasingly neglected in art. Burned up by high chroma screens, which have even leaked onto our streets and towns, brighter than the settings they scar, be they moving billboards or in our homes.
Bill
Like the drawing a lot, though !
ReplyDeleteBill
Bob Peak's art inspired musical compositions by today's greatest movie composers. They just had a Bob Peak concert in LA.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.musiccenter.org/tickets-free-events/lease-events/pictures-at-an-exhibition-the-paintings-of-bob-peak/
JSL
That effect was usually achieved through strobing lights and long exposures, so it is not a typical movie aesthetic (I believe?). The cinematography effect for movement is motion blur because obturators/sensitivity aren't nearly fast enough. To me, this looks more like comic language with motion lines.
ReplyDeleteThis relates back to the last post about lame-looking birds. Don't they always do? A soaring bird, I trust, can be illustrated. But an actively flapping one? Perhaps it's one of those things, like horses galloping, we weren't sure what was going on until photography. The only example of a dignified flappy bird my memory brings up is Picasso's dove, and that's sort of stretching it.
I learned recently that there are people who collect pigments, like old tubes of oils. Some of those must be handled with a lot of care because of toxicity. The blue color is especially scary. Cadmium? BARIUM?
These and other cases of innovative/experimental/etcetera technology are suited for Fine Art as displayed in museums and galleries. They don't matter much (or at all) for art reproduced in another medium -- the case of classical illustration found in printed media. Back in the day of Bernies Fuchs and Bob Peak (not to mention the likes of NC Wyeth and Mayfield Parrish), it was how illustration appeared when printed that mattered.
ReplyDeleteSo Peak (and Parrish) made stuff that would wow gallery viewers if seen in the original. But that's not what we remember them for: it was their ability. As you made clear regarding today's subject, David.
That was MAXFIELD Parrish in my previous comment, not "Mayfield". To the seventh circle of Hell with software guessing what word you're intending to write. ...Though I shoulda done a more careful job of proofing.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous/Bill wrote: "people have lost their sensitivities to subtleties and this seems to be increasingly neglected in art. Burned up by high chroma screens, which have even leaked onto our streets and towns"
ReplyDeleteThe same technologies that have widened the spectrum of alternatives-- whiter whites and blacker blacks, intense screens that burn our our retinas-- also improved our ability to focus on the gentlest nuances. Better reproductions of the softest pencil sketches. Better view of details of ceiling paintings in Renaissance cathedrals. Its all there on the menu if only we have the restraint and the patience to choose wisely.
"work is usually within relation, relative scales"-- Maxfield Parrish used to say that there was no such thing as "Parrish blue," he used regular blue paint out of the tube. The effects he achieved were by juxtaposing that blue against other colors. "Parrish blue" was a result of the relation of other colors.
As for the Peak, you question, "would it have lost anything from using a traditional cadmium or something at a comparable strength, other than the dayglo novelty?" Hard to say, but we do know that those Peak ads in the early 60s reached out of the magazine, grabbed readers by the lapels and shook them. In an era when illustrated magazines were losing battle after battle to television, Peak did something that television could never match.
Aninymnous/JSL-- Does anyone know what the music was like? I hope it wasn't just the soundtracks to movies for which Peak illustrated the posters.
Yeah, I wondered what the printed ads would have looked like - can guess reasonably well, as those type of colours (the were usually called - misnomered ? - 'flouescent' many years later) were most often then found on products for children and were very common.
ReplyDeleteIt's still very hard to maintain awareness that there was a time when skilled drawings were commonplace in advertising (almost every context it's seen it in now is as 'art'), and seeing stuff like this that's what leaps out electrically. Back then, when it was abundant, the novel rose-scarlet that was brighter than the white of the paper would.
The stuff you give from Maxfield Parrish shows how the power of understanding and using colour is what matters.
I think I missed your main point, which wasn't really about pigments but about excellence ?
But are the new technologies (which I think you were also including ?) really conducive to fostering it ?
There is something of a sculptural, organic unity to the fusion of the elements involved in drawing/painting.
Digital art seems to be an inverted process, replicating or making adaptions of 'analogue' 2d images (digital 'sculpture' is doubly inverted) that are alien to it.
I really see no advantage to it over what's been always used - which is not to say that it shouldn't be used or is not a useful tool for secondary considerations. (I'm not talking about the shortcuts it provides for people without traditional skill).
There's a good quote from Menzel on photography that James Gurney gives that captures something that's pertinent in this context:
"[...] discipline in certain important powers of the eyes, the hand, the memory, and the imagination concerning animated nature".
There was a time I'm sure when the appearance of the secondary world of images - sculpted forms and charcoal/ochre images on rocks surfaces - created consternation, and it lingers still in magic and superstitions. But the acts whereby they were made were also 'of the world' itself, and their making was analogous to its workings.
The new world we've recently created is something else, and risks taking us out of the old altogether, the harbouring earth. The screens are accelerants, both by their ubiquity and their potential to eclipse our normal sensual awarenesses of the world and our faculties to act as part of it - one of which is as a form which unites sight and mind with the world through the infintely subtle tracings of hands that are a part of it and become, when doing so, its own organs.
Bill
But onwards and upwards, anyway
ReplyDeletehttps://www.analitica.com/emprendimiento/noti-tips/regresa-fido-dido-celebrar-mes-7up/
Bill
(On a totally unrelated note, Taschen have a new Pirate-themed book out, has what looks like a generous number of images from Howard Pyle and Wyeth https://www.taschen.com/en/books/classics/08012/pirate-tales/ )
ReplyDeleteAnother great post! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteFor a start, as Bill mentioned above, the language of art is embodied by its relations bound within itself. Thus, the limits of brightness/darkness have no bearing on this whatsoever - a fact evidenced by the appearance of any artwork upon electrical screens.
No, art is a language agreed with the spectator.
ReplyDeleteChris is referring to the perameters you've established in a picture.
DeleteWhich are made consistent within themselves - "embodied by its relations bound within itself".
Or else everything goes assways. Such as adding a colour of an incongruent high chroma that upsets the other values that have been established'. Or making a background shadow too dark in relation to elements in the foreground. Etc.
Outside of pictures, our eyes are contantly readjusting light and dark as we move from one thing to another - they set a scale of values. In a painting or drawing, this is conveyed by the 'key' chosen to work in. You need to establish the right value-distance between tones.
(Not philosophical.)
Bill
No, art is a language agreed with the spectator.
ReplyDeleteIf you believe that then it follows that you believe art to be a meaningless, arbitrary game.
Relative color makes a big difference, but no artist could do what Peak did before fluorescent colors were invented. If you doubt it, study his shoe and clothing ads.
ReplyDeletexopxe-- I defer to you on whether the motion in those photographs was captured with strobe lights or video or time lapse photography; I think we agree that the camera, starting with Muybridge, helped artists understand and capture aspects of motions that were not previously apparent. That includes galloping horses and flapping birds. Doré and Rembrandt could make the reviled "Mbirds" in flight without camera help, but if they want an "actively flapping bird" that would satisfy Kev Ferrara they need help from the wonderful new tools.
ReplyDeleteRemember the famous 1912 painting by Italian Futurist painter Giacomo Balla of a Dog on a Leash on motion, where the legs were a blur? It was radical for the time.
Donald Pittenger-- If I understand your point, I agree-- whatever color Peak used would ultimately have to be reproduced in magazines using non-fluorescent ink. I think the reproduction process dulled down some of his colors, but when I compare originals with tearsheets I think the reproduction process dulled all of the originals in the 20th century. The color on Howard Pyle reproductions at the beginning of the 20th century was pathetic. By the end of the 20th century it was much better but still not perfect.
Have you seen Print Magazine issues from the 1960s, where paper and ink companies and printers showed off the new potential of fluorescent colors? The tone of those magazines was, "Yippeee!!" Dayglo, Peter Max, op art, Jim Steranko effects-- the whole graphic arts field was going nuts.
Anonymous/Bill-- Yes, I think part of the story here is that when the fire subsides on the color, it's important to have quality drawing underneath. The drawing may not be entirely visible when the ad first appears, but it makes a huge contribution to the success of the picture.
It's interesting, Peak was not primarily regarded as a draftsman, he was more a graphic designer. There were some (like Austin Briggs) who questioned Peak's drawing ability. But as you say, compared to most of today's alleged draftsmen Peak was a genius.
I do think that, just as the new tool of photography widened some opportunities for excellence, the tool of new colors did the same.
I think we agree that the camera, starting with Muybridge, helped artists understand and capture aspects of motions that were not previously apparent. That includes galloping horses and flapping birds.
ReplyDeleteFrederic Remington famously and controversially painted horse hooves entirely leaving the ground during gallop before muybridge actually captured his stop motion nags proving this. Because Remington simply observed this happening.
Similarly, if you need a camera to tell you that birds flap their wings and aren't always facing the viewer, you aren't much of an observer.
What kind of poet requires a camera to tell him about either love, the wind, or the wheat?
Robert Deis-- Many thanks. By the way, I checked out and enjoyed your blog on mens adventure magazines.
ReplyDeletechris bennett-- As you may have figured out from my comments I agree with much of what you say about a work of art being governed by the relations established within itself. Still, there is something new afoot with these newly invented pigments that I think may require us to broaden our perspective. (That's one reason artists with deep pockets are scrambling to patent the exclusive use of certain new colors).
If you haven't been to see an exhibition of the work of Anish Kapoor in person, I would urge you to do so. It's not just that, for example, his Vantablack series is said to be the blackest black ever made. (“This material is the blackest material in the universe. Blacker than a black hole."). It's that some of his colors can't be measured on a value scale with other colors. Some have a richness and a moisture and a 3 dimensionality that other, pre-existing colors simply don't have, and those factors seem essential to the quality of the color.
It's that some of his colors can't be measured on a value scale with other colors. Some have a richness and a moisture and a 3 dimensionality that other, pre-existing colors simply don't have, and those factors seem essential to the quality of the color.
ReplyDeleteThe 60s sensibility in a nutshell; forget sensations building out new meanings, just give me the new sensations.
"These colors go to 11."
It's the same with these audiophile types believing that the highest end sound system connected together by gold-armoured cables gives them closer contact to music. Hey, just wait until those tech implants come along and extend human hearing frequency range beyond 20 Hz and 20 kHz! Can't wait until we get those ultraviolet infrared goggles - Apelles, eat your heart out!
ReplyDeletekev ferrara and chris bennett-- It's true that technology won't give us better taste or a more thoughtful mind, but I think it would be a mistake to discount the many important things that it offers, and their impact on the art process.
ReplyDeleteAnimation was the product of that technology, and later Disney's multi-plane camera made a big difference in what animation could offer. Today if you talk with the Disney artists who went back and digitally re-mastered the early masterpieces, they have a very subtle and appreciative understanding of what the digital process can or can't contribute.
Kev makes fun of colors going to 11, but it's undeniable that there is a reality out there that goes way past 11 that we just cant see with eyes that go to 10. Our eyes have three photoreceptors, red, green and blue, but the mantis shrimp has 16 photoreceptors which enable them to see UV, visible and circularly polarised light. (Something that the three of us have discussed in the past:https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-tale-of-three-landscapes.html ) Humans are able to achieve, through technology, glimpses of what other creatures can see on the infra-red and UV spectrums. ( I'd love to hear a bunch of mantis shrimp sitting around talking about Bob Peak.). I don't think these technologies are qualitatively different from the illustrators you love wearing glasses because they are near sighted.
Chris makes fun of audiophiles with their gold-armoured cables. I doubt anyone will resolve the warfare over the sound quality of digital vs. vinyl, in part because the taste involved is subjective, but I'm sure you'd agree that technology can improve the listening experience for people with hearing disabilities, or for people with special needs to hear remotely, or for artists who are inspired by nature and can now hear the calls of whales or the songs of birds for the first time. Melville would've added a whole new chapter to Moby Dick if he could only have heard those whales.
I have great familiarity with the international battle between digital and analog cell phone sound quality involving Motorola, Nokia and Apple, and its results offer a market test for you: With billions of dollars on the line, measuring the taste of hundreds of millions of consumers, the digital packaging of sound via cell phone had so many benefits at so many levels that it reversed the prevailing technologies and empires fell in a few short years.
David,
ReplyDeleteI certainly agree that technology does and will continue to restore and at least compensate for impaired sensory functions. But this is distinct from the idea that extending the normal and natural parameters of the human senses will enhance the degree or nature of the meaning we intuit from that which we perceive. The natural physical constraints of our bodies define our humanity, just as the physical constraints on a bird define what it means to be a bird. And so we travel hundreds of miles in a few hours by car, but our sense of distance remains firmly rooted and scaled to as far as we can see and the effort it takes to walk it.
chris bennett wrote: "The natural physical constraints of our bodies define our humanity, just as the physical constraints on a bird define what it means to be a bird."
ReplyDeleteAh, but the "natural physical constraints of our bodies" are changing faster and faster. It used to be that reconfiguring our genes was a monopoly of major institutions, such as the governments redesigning our lungs so we will be able to breathe on other planets, or strengthening our bones so we will be able to withstand the gravity on other planets. But now that CRISPR and other promising gene editing technologies are empowering a wider group of adventurers, that is likely to expand the definition of our humanity under the standard you espouse.
More controversially, scientists are looking at ways of capturing all the electrical pulses from our nervous system (including everything we see, hear, touch, smell and taste) and recording it on a chip implanted at birth. If we can take a full lifetime of experiences and transfer them to another living host, we essentially have immortality (or at least incarnation). If Kev Ferrara lives for 500 years, he might finally learn to appreciate Cy Twombly's art.
If the deal is that Kev can live for 500 years but has to look at Cy Twombly's art for that long I strongly doubt if he'll take it.
ReplyDeleteAnd time is the issue I have with your argument above: our entire psyche has evolved to be what it is by way of its embodiment within the constraints of our physicality over millions of years. And that embodiment is a reflection of that which formed it; such things as how long we live and its changing capabilities, that day and night form our sleep patterns, the seasons giving meaningful shape to duration etc etc etc. I could go on but I think you get the idea.
Breaking our innate relationship with the physical world and thereby its relationship to us is precisely where our phycological problems are coming from. For example, the little black mirror in our pocket and its promise of super-human connectedness is giving us the exact opposite, downgrading our belonging with every upgrade.
No need for that much.
ReplyDeleteBill, if that was his meaning it was stated in a very weird way ("the language of art is embodied?"). His followup also suggests he didn't mean that.
Chris, if the language is not shared then there's no communication. I find art that only talks to itself more meaningless and depressing.
David, yeah, I wonder if the concept of realism hasn't shifted from "it looks like in reality" to "it looks like a photo".
Kev, that's an XX-century painting that is well into the photography era. I'm interested in examples that we won't find "wonky" from XVIII century and before, I'm honestly curious
Audiophiles are bad examples because they are obsessed with the fidelity of reproduction, not expressing anything new (and yes, digital medium beats the crap out of analog storage, unless you believe in magic). A better reference could be the apparition of new musical instruments and how they allowed new expressions. The pianoforte added the concept of dynamics to the harpsichord. The electric guitar added the sustain to the classic guitar (but not the 11 on a dial; that's amplification). The synthesizer allowed us to manipulate and create timbre from scratch, perhaps the closest thing to inventing new colors. All these advances allowed new musical expression, stuff that was impossible or not engaging enough before.
When you read da Vinci going on and on about how to make pigments in his treatise on painting you get the same vibes as when you hear a modern indy rocker go on and on about guitar pedal setups and the correct way to mike a drum set. They just love it and consider it important. At the same time, I'm sure there existed a monk bitching about this newfangled gold illumination. What's wrong with ochre and this blue (which will kill you if you stare at it too hard)?
They combined fluorescent dyes with a new class of polymers, then milled the result to produce brilliant pigments.
ReplyDeleteNot to be a pedant, but it appears you're confusing dyes and pigments. Most of what the Dayglo Color Corp produced were dyes. There are many dyes, and they have flat dense chemical structures that make them able capture more light, producing high saturation colors, but also makes their chemical structures fragile and they easily break down under light (hence Bob Peaks ruined pictures).
There are very few pigments, and you know their names because they have been used for hundreds or thousands of years (ochre (PY43), titanium oxide (PW6), Mars Black (PBk11), Cadmium red (PR108), cobalt (PV14), ultramarine (PB29), etc.) Pigments, generally, have "fat" chemical structures which make them more lightfast, but also make them usually less saturated because the light has less surface area to reflect off of. When we find a pigment that is saturated, it's very big news.
Humans have had very high saturation dyes going back thousands of years (see, for example, native people's use of plant-based dyes, like indigo). The great painters didn't use dyes because they realized they wouldn't stand the test of time. Instead, they relegated themselves to the much smaller color range of pigments, so that their paintings could be appreciated by future generations.
What Bob Peak did was a known no-no, using a profoundly inferior paint product. It was not a technological advance. There have been red dye products that bright for thousands of years. For example, one merely needs to grind up beet root or lac bugs with a medium and they will have equally saturated red dyes to anything Bob Peak used.
Chris, if the language is not shared then there's no communication.
ReplyDeleteAh, then it seems we've misunderstood each other!
I thought you were inferring that human consensus about what forms the language of art is arbitrary and not founded on the commonality of our individual experiences of the fundamental nature of being. In other words, the way the constraints of nature compel us to read it.
I find art that only talks to itself more meaningless and depressing.
Which would be why I would cite the belief system of postmodernism as an example of this. (Though you might disagree here)
"...now that CRISPR and other promising gene editing technologies are empowering a wider group of adventurers, that is likely to expand the definition of our humanity under the standard you espouse."
ReplyDeleteEvolutionary Hymn
Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.
Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can never go astray.
To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.
Ask not if it's god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.
Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature's simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
'Goodness = what comes next.'
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.
Oh then! Value means survival-
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it may well be).
- C.S. Lewis
(Bill)
ReplyDelete“It's undeniable that there is a reality out there that goes way past 11 that we just cant see with eyes that go to 10. Our eyes have three photoreceptors, red, green and blue, but the mantis shrimp has 16 photoreceptors which enable them to see UV, visible and circularly polarised light.”
A brief check reveals the Mantis Supervision™ thing was debunked a decade ago. Studies showed they actually see worse than most other creatures, and with terrible abilities to discern between colors.
Crustaceans in general probably don’t even “see” colors in any sense we would understand, as they apparently lack a mind’s eye to perceive mental visions with. They would just react to sensory stimulus without actually perceiving the re-illusioning of it through our complicated mammalian visual-cortexical procedure. (Some humans suffer strokes that cause this phenomenon, of reacting to phenomenon perfectly normally without being able to see it. Which means they perceive it, but they don't see themselves seeing it. The inner TV screen is blank. Thus the beauty of color, shape or pattern is invisible to them, utterly absent from their lives.)
But why presume other wavelengths or polarities of light would be “colored” or visually sonorous in any sense that we might find beautiful anyway? The greater likelihood is that, if we could "see" them in any experiential sense, they would confuse our vision of the beautiful with too much irrelevancy, blur, and contradiction. (Which is probably why we are evolved to not see them.)
Too much information isn’t good sensing, nor good poetry. Too much of any sensation is an overload. Surely this is why we filter out so much blue from our vision (we all have far fewer blue receptors than green or red). We presumably live on a much bluer world than we actually see. How would seeing the actual blue content of our world as accurately as we see red or green help us? All the blue would drown out all the other beautiful colors.
Nor is pinging the visual extremes good poetry. Back in the Golden Age artists were specifically taught not to go to the purest black or purest white on their palettes. (The reason is that expressive relationships aren't contests of attraction.)
Even if Mantis Supervision™ were real, any ersatz simulation of it passing through your boggled ogle goggles would still be reduced down and seen via blue, green, and red photoreceptors. Just as Peak's Dayglo pops were reduced down to CMYK in print.
Our sensorium exists in a goldilocks zone of aesthetic beauty. Appreciate within what we have, not without. Why Tantalus yourself?
(Anecdotally, I hear that 1960s crustaceans preferred the work of Robert Weaver.)
"No, art is a language agreed with the spectator (...) if the language is not shared then there's no communication."
ReplyDeleteAesthetic communication requires no agreement. As Stanley Meltzoff pointed out, the suggestions of art are so powerful that they are better understood as commands.
This is an experiential language based on basic human sensory intuitions. It not a read/decoded one built of intellectual conventions. The majority can experience it, but only a tiny minority have ever had a real facility in "speaking" it.
Back in the Golden Age artists were specifically taught not to go to the purest black or purest white on their palettes. (The reason is that expressive relationships aren't contests of attraction.)
ReplyDeleteReally? I thought that was because pure black and pure white are cool colors, and will make your picture trend milky if not warmed up with some ochre or burnt umber?
Bill,
ReplyDeleteTime is the issue, and I believe C S Lewis had long scale time in mind with regard to what he means by the fruits of evolution. For this reason technological extensions to the range of what humans can register through their senses and the utilitarian benefits thereof does not change how natural phenomena affect our sense of their meaning.
Imagine a medical intervention that changes us such that we no longer require sleep. For starters, gone would be our temporary sojourn with death, along with dreaming and a return to the real world. Gone would be our sense of what the night means and therefore what the day means, our understanding of morning, of evening and the very number of our days.
It will have taken away a foundational pattern of what makes our life, and the same is true for patterns at smaller scales. The pattern of our being is an expression fitted to the patterns that lay themselves out within the world at large.
I thought that was because pure black and pure white are cool colors, and will make your picture trend milky if not warmed up with some ochre or burnt umber?
ReplyDeleteA ton of Golden Age work was painted in grayscale (en grisaille) and a lot in cool color. It's a more global point than preventing chalkiness, assuming some degree of naturalism. It's about holding value relations tight rather than going for extreme highlights and lowlights, which would create contrasty obvious peaks that break out of natural dark and light value ranges and patterns.
Pyle put it, "Keep a shot in your locker." He also said, "Strength is not produced by strong contrasts."
Harvey Dunn said, "Never go to the extremes of your palette."
See for yourself: Look around you, go outside. And try to see the darkest dark you can see. And then debate with yourself whether some optimal black is even approached. Even in the middle of the night you'd be hard pressed to find a truly black black. Atmosphere is interposing everywhere and light is bouncing around all the time.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAlso, a black that absorbs 100% of light or a white that reflects 100% of light will each compromise the surface of the painting, the former punching a hole in it and the latter causing a portion to lift away.
ReplyDeleteBoth break the unity of the relations that form the painting by alienating themselves from the substrate that embodies those relations. Like actors who look at the camera and 'break the fourth wall'.
Thanks Chris,
ReplyDeleteI think the poem was directed at certain philosophies of directed 'progress' that had, at that time, incorporated fantasies of directing physical evolution.
They seemed since to have gone through a lenghty period of ridicule but are again popping up now with the new technologies.
Which are admittedly useful for intervening in situations where healthy functioning has gone awry, but 'augmenting' humanity remains an absurdity.
The spectrum of our senses defines and regulates us, as I think Kev has pointed to. We're fitted to the earth in a particular way that makes us what we are. Apparent enlarged capacities such as are attributed to or known in other organisms may come at the expense of what has enabled humans to become human. (We can already see that artififial engineering outside us blunts us to experiencing human capacities that were formerly general.)
And the point you made about sleep is of extreme importance. It's natural and necessary, almost like a respiratory process for consciousness.
Even pain/suffering shape us. Numbing these could have profound implications for empathic capacity, we'd end up with a sociopathic society.
Similarly, the processes of growth, fullness, decline and then surrender to a new generation is what has shaped civilisation and humanity as a whole. Death is not a pathology, but clinging to or chasing after what is no longer proper to us is; and can only lead to some kind of junkie-like pursuit of stimulus to stave off ennui in a diseased manner that doesn't occur in healthy processes of growth and life.
Bill
xopxe - "I wonder if the concept of realism hasn't shifted from "it looks like in reality" to "it looks like a photo".
ReplyDelete+
"that is well into the photography era. I'm interested in examples that we won't find "wonky" from XVIII century and before, I'm honestly curious."
That first one is an interesting one. Seeing new ways of conveying things does alter how things are later portrayed, even if the same methods aren't used.
I looked to see how realistic were earlier portrayals of birds in flight after the earlier discussion, and honestly couldn't find any 'realistic' flight depictions (by the standards of our 'knowledge' of it these days) that didn't look like staged taxidermy. But as with the above, once you see something that enlarges or shifts your attention once, it modifies you thereafter - as it probably did to depictions of birds in flight even when photo-reference wasn't being used.
There are other factors to consider, though - increased anatomical knowledge in the 19th century and ease of access to it, and these preceded Muybridge. Increased scientific awareness - and outlook - was becomming general, to the extent that there were shifts in human consciousness about the natural world.
Look at 18th and early 19th century paintings of trees, which were effectively compliant models, but very important facts about them were still disregarded.
Were they unseen, or just unattended to and only expressed in terms of a limited set of their actual or symbolic qualities ? Both, I'd say, in different degrees and with different artists (look at Stubbs' animals vs some of his contemporaries....even today I've heard some wildlife artists who know their stuff say that seeing miss-markings on a picture of goosewing feathers looks as painful to them as a six-fingered hand on a human)
The changes in thought and perception would have demanded more attention given to depicting flight properly. But it's not all 'progress' (there are peaks and troughs through history), or apace across regions.
And there are - either independent of or in tandem with increased scientific attention to or enlarged understanding of the natural world - people with exceptional observational ability and powers of recall, and always have been, that put the rest of us in the shade.
I don't think it impossible that either the painting Kev gave or the one from Ruskin the other day relied more on these kind of faculties - either held by the artist themselves or mediated and then turned into personal knowledge which they brought to their pictures - far more than any knowledge gained from photos.
I'd like to know what books illustrating how bird's wings moved existed prior to Muybridge, and all the dates involved.
Bill
I wonder if the concept of realism hasn't shifted from "it looks like in reality" to "it looks like a photo".
ReplyDelete"Seeing new ways of conveying things does alter how things are later portrayed, even if the same methods aren't used."
How the ubiquitous use of photography in newspapers and periodicals distorted the perception of reality quite widely, and particularly among highly addicted readers, is something I've been flagging up for a long while.
Photography's just-so existential "accuracy" is enormously seductive, even though the frozen nature of an instant's worth of captured light rays is absolutely fraudulent with respect to how time and movement actually flows and how we process our understanding of what we see and the nature of presence.
Equally bad is the easy assumption that a photograph - as a kind of perfect journalistic recording - is sufficient to explain what is going on in any given area or situation; encouraging hasty generalization fallacies as a rule. Also photographs are unbelievably cheap and easy to acquire or make, and anybody can be flattered to be an artist if photographic captures are publicly declared "art."
All of the above is exploited to manipulate the photography-consuming audience.
Those who recognize the fraudulence of photography tend to be philosophical artists who've spent a lot of time in direct observation, but other hypersensitives as well. A small subset of people compared to the many millions brainwashed by mass mediation. Photographs even seduce artists with their easy frozen accuracy, especially under deadline. Vanishingly few artist have used photography well as far as I can tell; only the best talents.
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On realistic bird flight... it needs to be understood that even plein air painting only really got going in the early 19th century. And even then... until now, only a small subset of artists ever got off their lazy studio butts and actually trudged outside with the beating sun, the bugs, the wind, and their pochade boxes.
So direct observation of nature - essential to being a good poet of landscape or anything else of the natural world - has always been rare.
Howard Pyle insisted on outdoor painting, and taught extensive summer sessions beginning around 1900 with that in mind. And also taught that "Imaginative Projection" was equally essential to making good work, as was composing effects and being suggestive in order to bring life and liveliness and emotion. He also understood that photography could be an excellent tool if used properly in its place.
Everett's hyperlinked birds on the shore picture is a combination of all the above. He was in Pyle's summer sessions, painted outdoors himself constantly, and took his own classes outdoors to paint. He also was a great student of Pyle's Imaginative Projection and theories of composition and eye control. And he also used photography.
Kev - "...Pyle's Imaginative Projection..."
ReplyDeleteI've seen snippets about this here (actually here) and there, and read that it's only been preserved from his student's accounts. But do you know if there any text sources that go into it in any detail ?
After I typed that, I looked and found the references at https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/pyle-as-a-picture-maker - so I'll check to see if any of those can be found online or easily otherwise; but if you can suggest anything it'd be much appreciated.
I thought that picture looked like Everett (I enjoyed the essays on the site btw)
I think that, other than as references for detail, costumes, and so on, photos will mess anything up unless you absorb the elements, get rid of it and look away, and then try to recreate it in visual thought as a three dimensional space that you're within.
Bill
Here's another example related to the Everett painting. A class of painters that did a lot of work on moving nature were marine painters. Seascapes were a genre in itself. But even if you take a competent one, like Aivazovski, the waves breaking on the shores look *unrealistic* compared to Everett's stylized waves. Either the painters changed, or we the observers, changed, but there's something fishy going on.
ReplyDeleteIn AI research there's a funny phenomenon where whatever hard problem people are working on seems to be the main problem that, once solved, will really solve the problem of Intelligence for real. But once it is solved, we all suddenly agree it isn't actually that hard nor fundamental. Chess, proof building, Turing tests, pattern recognition, text translation, all have somewhat anticlimatic solutions. Perhaps photography was the anticlimactic solution to a problem artists had been obsessing over for too long, and finally allowed them to move to some new problems.
Realism in painting, in all the most important respects, had bettered photography long before the latter came along, though.
DeleteBill
But even if you take a competent one, like Aivazovski, the waves breaking on the shores look *unrealistic* compared to Everett's stylized waves. Either the painters changed, or we the observers, changed, but there's something fishy going on."
ReplyDeleteEverett's waves and birds are formed/structured/composed and patterned to produce various effects, poetic and aesthetic. Which are essentially visual magic tricks, requiring extreme eye control, a structural understanding of suggestion, and a functional synthetic imagination. Howard Pyle was the world master of this kind of stuff in his prime, but then Everett (and other Pyle students) took it to a different and unique place. Other American Imagists were in the same ballpark as Pyle's thinking on effects, but each with their own proclivities and tone and manner: Homer, Dewing, Remington, Inness, Arthur Matthews, Booth, Gruger, Garber, Carlsen, Carlson, Rockwell, Waugh, and so on.
The somewhat mystical, somewhat technical, somewhat empirical, somewhat poetic approach to composition was unique to the United States. And not only because in Europe some who thought similarly either didn't really pass on their expertise or became Modernists/Expressionists.
Aivazovski, in my opinion, is a very talented painter who didn't have good compositional information at all, and didn't really look at the ocean to do his pictures. He pictures lack balance, pattern, and naturalism. And he badly over-uses his most well-understood effects, cheapening them into tricks. Contrast him with Frederick Judd Waugh, who again had a lot in common with the Pyle tradition. Waugh studied how waves behaved like a scientist. He was down at the shore all the time observing. And then in his composing, he thought big, in patterns, an imagist in the American tradition. Pattern more than detail. Aivazovski spends himself in thinking about the wrong things and at the wrong scale of articulation.
After I typed that, I looked and found the references at https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/pyle-as-a-picture-maker - so I'll check to see if any of those can be found online or easily otherwise; but if you can suggest anything it'd be much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteYou'll find my name in the "resources" section of that essay. It's a solid account.
I think Henry Pitz's books on Pyle and The Brandywine Tradition also have descriptions of Pyle's theory and I don't think Jim Gurney mentions them in that article. Harvey Dunn's An Evening in the Classroom is also available online.
(Errata: I wrote "Imaginative Projection" but I meant "Mental Projection." Same thing.)
Thanks. Printed the Harvey Dunn on a recommendation you gave to someone here a while back.
DeleteThe Delaware museum has the original notebook by HP's students digitised (fully photographed), I see now.
Bill