How to Paint the Figure in Trompe l'Oeil

Here is a detail from the finished painting, enlarged because I used very small brushes.

You can use any background you like. I used an old faux-painted limestone sample I had lying around, but you could just as easily do this on faux bois to imitate the look of carved wood. The only stipulation I'd make is that to get the best effect, your background should be no darker than mid-range on the value scale.

In the next image, you can see the brushes I used. One small pointy one, and another splayed out and busted one. When doing shadows, I'd paint with Mr. Pointy then stipple and soften with the busted one. I'm not very fussy about materials or brushes. When I was young, I used to read all those manuals and study hard to learn the "secret" materials that would give me the edge. The only secret, I learned, is your eyes.

Step 1

 If you look closely in Step 1, you can just make out the pencil lines I used to establish the basic design. I took a photo of a bas relief panel at the Met as my reference. This is actually the first time I've used a photograph of actual relief as reference material. Mostly, I'm either inventing relief or copying another trompe l'oeil painter's work (who probably also invented the relief). This was a great chance for me to exercise Rule # 1 in illusionistic painting: Paint what you see, not what you know. 

It's all too easy to fall back on what we "know" about Form rather than simply using the evidence presented before our eyes. "Shadows are dark; highlights are white; reflected light goes here; etc." These are all learned rather than observed truths. [Painters use old tricks such as flipping their image upside down, or examining their work in a mirror, to escape the natural tendency to paint what we think we see.]

Step 2

Step 2 shows the completed shadows. There are no highlights at all here. You can see that the effect is 99% complete already. We could easily leave it like this, and call it a day.

I build the shadows very slowly using Ultramarine and Raw Umber acrylic paint, mixed with a little matte varnish (which dries quickly so I can keep working) as a medium.

The shadows are built up in layers. I never try to establish the darkest dark in the first pass. It's much more tentative then that. I build up darks in translucent glazes, always erring on the lighter side. I tend to work back and forth all over the image, as opposed to finishing each area completely as I go.

Step 3

Step 3 is my first pass at highlights. They might be hard to detect on your screen, as they are very subtle, but they are there. I used an opaque white, mixed with yellow and a little purple. I've heard that some people like to shift the hue of their highlights in opposition to the background color in order to make them pop more. [In other words, if the background hue is yellow (as with mine), they might shift their highlights into purple so that they jump out at you.] I don't do this. I use a lighter value of the background.

Use highlights very sparingly! As subtle as mine might look to you, when I look at the opening detail image of this post, the highlights jump out at me as being too strong and brushy. The image looks like it's been dusted with snow.  The shadows are soft and muted, as they should be, but the highlights are harsh, overused and overly delineated. We want to avoid this at all costs. (It was too late for me).

Step 4

 In Step 4, the only difference is that I carefully glazed the chest, top of the head, and the right knee with a second highlight. I decided that those three areas should be a little more prominent than they were.

It will be easier to see the differences between stages if you view these images in slideshow mode, and scroll between them.

Step 5

 Step 5 might be hard to see, but I think it made a difference. Since all my highlights were already laid down, the only way I could make the relief pop a little more was by darkening the background. I explained the reasoning behind this in a separate post about relative value, here.

I certainly didn't want to add any more highlights, as mine were already too bright. Instead, I used a very washy ultramarine/raw umber glaze and stippled it all around the top right corner, outside the main figure.

I also used a glazed version of my highlight color and subtly lightened the bottom left corner (again, outside the figure only).

Finished.

To give you an idea of how light/dark my values are, here is a chart that shows you (below)...

Along the top you see 3 swatches of color. These represent averaged tones taken directly from the finished piece. Directly underneath them, you see 3 grey values (A, B, and C). These are the same colors from the top line desaturated so as to see value only. Below that, I plotted A, B, and C against the Munsell value chart. You can see that the entirety of my painting occupies roughly three value steps on the Munsell chart (from 6 to 9). No white, and nothing at all on the lower half of the chart.

Some more detail photos...

How to Paint Reflections on Water

Sommarnoje, Anders Zorn
showing lengthened and broken reflections beneath the boat and pier.

The post title is a tad misleading, as it is more about seeing and understanding than painting. Why do reflections appear longer in rippled water compared to smooth water? Why do reflections not appear at all in very rough water? Is there any quantifiable way for painters to measure the correct length of reflections, besides just painting a bunch of wiggly lines?

And if you feel like a little musical accompaniment while you wrap your head around some math, try Claude Debussy's "Reflections in Water."

I'm going to let my illustrations do most of the talking in this post. I hope that they're clear enough that you will be able to understand the principles just by studying them.

Figure 1

In Figure 1 above, there is a pole [AB] standing out of the water. You can imagine looking at it along sight lines that run through an imaginary picture plane. The top of the pole intersects the picture plane (the canvas you're painting on) at point A1. The visible bottom of the pole above the water would appear on your canvas at point B1. If the surface of the water was as smooth as a mirror, the reflection of your pole on the water would be painted on your canvas extending down to point C1. Notice too that the angles x, y, and z are the same when on a perfectly flat surface.

Figure 2

If there was a concrete pier as in Figure 2, the reflections would end up looking as they do in Figure 3, below. Note the reflection of the pole in the water below. If you study Figure 2 you will understand why the reflection simply peeks out a short length below the pier reflection instead of appearing to be the full length of the pole itself.

Figure 3

Fur Traders descending the Missouri, George Caleb Bingham

In the beautiful painting by Anders Zorn that opens this post, we see that the reflection of the boat extends downwards quite a bit below where one might expect. Why? Simply because water is never as smooth as it appears in our illustrations above. Despite what Caleb Bingham might have us believe (above), water almost always has some visible movement causing ripples or waves. These waves cause the reflections to distort and extend lower on the canvas.

The reflection of a pole in rippled water [Fig. 4] would thus appear to extend in a broken line all the way down our canvas to point D1. I hope that by studying the next couple of illustrations you can understand the effect of broken water conditions upon reflections.

In addition, rougher bodies of water appear to be brighter overall than smooth bodies of water. The fascinating reason has something to do with Galileo, and can be found in a separate blogpost, here.

Figure 4

The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt), by Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins, famously mathematical when it came to constructing his paintings, drew an illustration [Fig. 5] in one of his notebooks that shows why the reflections in rippled water appear "wiggly."

Figure 5

I've created my own version of the same phenomenon [Fig. 6], with some added notes that might help clarify what's happening.

Q: Why is the Sky Brighter over the Sea when it's Windy?

Breezing Up, Winslow Homer

A: Ask a sailor. 

There was a time when reading the weather meant more than just clicking an app on your smartphone. Seafaring Greeks, Vikings or Moors weren't concerned about choosing appropriate footwear for the long walk to the car, or remembering to pack a sweater to brave frigid air conditioners in corporate HQ; they needed to learn to read natural signs of approaching weather because their lives depended on it.

Becalmed mariners have long known when a stiff wind is approaching because the sky over the sea gets brighter in that direction. Why? It was a mystery for years until Galileo Galilei came along and applied his massive brain to the problem. The famed mathematician and astronomer was known to take long walks on the beach while contemplating the heavens, and while sitting on a hill overlooking the ocean one day, it suddenly occurred to him.

He had been pondering the question of the texture of the moon: Since the moon appeared so bright in the night sky, did that mean that its surface was mirror-like? Was it so smooth that it reflected the sun's rays directly towards the eyes of this earth-bound observer? Or was it rough and rocky?

His Eureka moment came while witnessing the effect of approaching wind on the water. As the wind picked up, it would roughen the surface of the water. If the sun was shining at the time, and the air being dense with moisture, the now fractured surface of the water would bounce the reflection of the light source (the sun) in all directions, where it would be scattered by the humid atmosphere and appear bright:

"From such waves, as from many mirrors spread over a wide area, there would originate a much brighter reflection of the sun than would exist if the sea were calm. Then that part of the vapor-laden air may be made brighter by this new light and by the diffusion of that reflection.  

This air, being high, sends also some reflection of light to the eyes of the sailors, while they, being low and far off would not be able to receive the primary reflection from that part of the sea which is already being ruffled by the wind twenty or thirty miles away. And that is how they perceive and predict a wind from afar."

Galileo's theory that rougher surfaces appear brighter than smooth surfaces led him to claim that the surface of the moon must be rocky and not glass-like; a theory that would be proven correct many centuries later when we finally stood on it. I say "we": I had nothing to do with it. 

He proposed a thought experiment to illustrate his point: Imagine that the sun is shining on a bright white-washed stone wall. Now, imagine hanging a mirror on that wall and stepping across the courtyard. Which looks brighter; the mirror or the wall? Spoiler alert: it's the wall.

Man in Armour, Rembrandt van Rijn

What's this got to do with painting? 

Medieval illuminators knew to think of gold-leafed areas of their panels as dark compositional elements, even though symbolically they represented the effulgent light of the Lord. It was obvious to them that while the applied gold surface may have been reflective, it was not shiny: it was physically dark under normal lighting conditions. 

Basically my point is this: paint shiny surfaces dark except for their specular highlights.

You should also look at this post regarding the technique for painting reflective surfaces like gold.

Canaletto and Superman

Westminster Bridge, by Canaletto (1746)

Canaletto is known to have used Camera Ottica to mechanically assist in creating his cityscapes of Venice, but closer study reveals that that wasn't the end of the story. He manipulated the perspective in his scenes, sometimes changing the vantage point and giving a more flattened and distant view. Pushing the stationpoint back gives the viewer a more panoramic and flattened picture plane.

I call it Superman Perspective. It’s the flattened way things would look if you could see detail from a thousand miles away. In his “Westminster Bridge” painting, we get the sense that Canaletto must have used a high-powered telescope to see his subject. There’s very little evidence of linear perspective in the arches under the bridge. The closer you are, the more distortion will be apparent. In reality, you’d have to swing your head around to take in this whole scene, and the bridge would appear to balloon towards you in the center. Canaletto has made the artistic choice to straighten the bridge ‘unnaturally’.

It’s more impersonal, but it depends upon your goal. Maybe, in the end, the telescopic view speaks volumes about Canaletto’s personality. Perhaps he wanted to see the world from a distance, to rise above the cacophony of human interactions. For someone like Caravaggio, on the other hand, human drama was clearly the very stuff of life. He'd have us sit right at the table in Supper at Emmaus, involving us directly in the conversation.

These cubes drawn in two-point perspective (above) illustrate my point. In A, on the left, the viewer is positioned a thousand miles away from the cube, viewing it as if with Superman’s supervision. The red orthogonals (lines drawn along receding parallel lines to the vanishing point) of the cube stretch out to some infinitely distant theoretical point on either side when presumably they would converge into Vanishing Points 1 and 2. The further away from the object we are, the further away the vanishing points are.

They closer we get to the object (or more accurately the picture plane), the closer to the centre line those Vanishing Points come. In B, on the right, we are so close to the cube that it’s sides have become completely distorted and are towering over us. You can see that the vanishing points (VP1 and VP2) are so close to the center line that they are visible within the frame. This is known in architectural draughting as “accelerated perspective,” because it gives an exaggerated sense of spatial depth.

In both these photos of the same vase from the Vanderbilt mansion in Rhode Island, the horizon line is level with the lion’s head. However, there’s a difference: we can tell that the camera was closer to the vase in the photo on the right. How do we know? The orthogonals on the right photo recede to vanishing points closer to the center line. This creates the kind of distortion we saw in the cube illustration.

In a large mural of a niche, for example, we would want to paint the vase more as it appears on the left, regardless of the stationpoint of the viewer in actual space. Why? Too much distortion in a mural is ugly (that's just my opinion).  I'm not talking about anamorphism here (where the stationpoint strictly determines the construction of the paintings perspective), I'm talking about wall sized paintings in the style of the French landscape panoramas of Zuber et Cie. I'd argue that large murals are meant to be viewed from a distance, so our linear perspective should reflect that. 

I'll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours [Part I]

Wiley Purkey

Well, there's been such a huge response that I'm going to be making this into a series of posts. I'm getting palpitations thinking about all the money I could blow on the books I don't have here. 

Artist Wiley Purkey submitted this great selection. The period in American Art around the 1920s is fascinating to me. Artists reacted in different ways to the mechanization of Industry. Disenchanted by the industrialization of America, the likes of Edward Hopper captured the sense of urban isolation felt by so many. An intensely private man, and a lifelong celibate, he painted this America from the inside. The Regionalists, on the other hand, represented an artistic belief that rural America and back-to-basics labor off the land could replace urbanization and the factory-line. Illustrators Howard Pyle, and his student N.C. Wyeth, espoused a similar (called Brandywine) Romanticism of New England. Burchfield portrayed similarly heightened visions of the American landscape, turning his back on the urban world of his old friend Hopper. Andrew Wyeth was called a 'Regionalist' by his detractors, but he painted a "Pennsylvania [that] seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue" [source]. This was not quite the Romantic regionalism of his contemporaries. Wyeth's was darker, more private. A rural version of Hopper's urbanity. Impressionists in Winter is, in my opinion, the best of Impressionist art. When the artist's palette is reduced to almost nothing, there's a reliance on composition and value that is almost Japanese at times. Not surprising then to see a copy of Whistler's beautiful Etchings here too.

Book Links: 

The Regionalists, by Nancy Heller

Charles Burchfield

Impressionists in Winter

Andrew Wyeth

James Montgomery Flagg
Maxfield Parrish

Theresa Cheek, of Art's The Answer!

Art's The Answer! is the fantastic blog written by Theresa Cheek, who clearly has a passion for the decorative arts, and for sharing all she comes across. Konemann does a great job of bringing out large format, lavishly photographed, and reasonably priced books on architecture and ornamentation. This is just a tiny selection of Theresa's vast collection on a huge variety of subjects. Be sure to check out her blog. And just peeking in on the far right is a book that's very popular with my West Coast friends, called Ca'toga. It's about the Dali-meets-Baroque-meets-Antiquity estate of Venetian artist Carlo Machiori. I've yet to come across a book dedicated solely to the painted surfaces of Versailles, but I'm sure it's out there. Until then, I love to browse through books such as Splendors of Versailles, for snippets of Oudry's landscapes and Fontenay's flowers and vases. Incredible stuff.

The St. Laurent book is a rare glimpse into the decor stylings of one of the 20th Century's very best designers. Jacques Grange features heavily in the selections, and though the lavishness of the homes becomes makes me feel a bit claustrophobic after a while [I want to run off and live in Wyeth's cabin by the end of the book], it's well worth the investment.

Koneman titles

Ca'toga
The Private World of Yves St. Laurent & Pierre Bergé
Splendors of Versailles

Karen

The 1920s once again putting on a strong show, this time from a European design perspective. Karen of Chicago's Des Travaux sent us this great shot, showing some of the stalwart classics we all know and love, along with some real treasures. Jansen Furniture is a great book about the powerhouse Paris-based design company, who's ebony and ivory geometrical inlay doors are a real treat. I narrowly missed the opportunity to create replicas of those doors once. Jean Dunand is also a master interior designer, and perhaps the greatest lacquer artist of the Art Deco period. I've downloaded any image of his incredible standing screens that I can get my hands on. Paul Poiret is the creator of the most beautiful dresses ever made. Click the link and you'll see what I mean. It's tragic that he was ruined completely by WWI and made bankrupt. As someone who'd backed myself into a rarified corner of decorative painting, I'm all too aware that tough times reveal the precariousness of this business. Elkins, on the other hand, thrived, and by the end of her illustrious career had created a huge number of interiors for the West Coast glitterati. And what I wouldn't give for that copy of Antonio Basoli's stunning designs.

Jansen Furniture

Jean Dunand

Poiret (Rizzoli)

Frances Elkins

Antonio Basoli

Early American Decoration

Chinoiserie (Phaidon)

Art Instruction books that I see on a lot of shelves (including my own):

The Art of Faux (P. Finkelstein)

Handbook of Painted Decoration (Y. Guegan)

Okay, gotta go. Keep sending them in! I'll upload more shots when I have a chance.

Engravings of Raphael's Designs for the Vatican Loggia

This should quicken the pulse of at least a few ornament nerds out there. I know I'm not completely alone. Yeah, you know who you are. This is my second post on the subject of the extremely rare full color set of engravings, hand-painted in gouache, of Raphael's incredible designs for the Vatican Loggia.

I posted an enormous set with 277 large format details, taken directly from the original engravings, on my Flickr page. You won't find these anywhere else, you lucky lucky bastards. Except if you happen to own one of the only three full surviving color sets, of course. In which case I hate you.

For information on the engravings themselves, and background to the Vatican loggia, see this earlier post on my blog.

Enjoy!

Wearing black ski masks, and suspended from the ceiling so as not to trip the alarms

Here's an oblique detail showing the beautiful gilding on the Noah's Ark panel

Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck

G. Trignac

“I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful

and rich an expression of life as growth.”

Henry Miller

The Empire in a state of dissipation, portrayed as a post-industrial nightmare on the brink of total ruin, is a theme common to art since, well, the Industrial Age. [I'm doing my best Robert Hughes impression here]. The theme has many artistic commentators working in various media, but there's something about engraving that lends itself best to burned-out apocalyptic landscapes.

 Piranesi (1720-1778) was above all an architect who loved recording ancient ruins in his etchings, but it's his Carceri (1745), or Prison Views, that are called to mind in the works of French engravers Charles Meryon (1821-1868) and Gérard Trignac (1955-). Supposedly conceived as "visions during the delirium of a fever," it's Piranesi's surrealist side that is his most enduring legacy, and it's illustrators like these who've carried the torch.

G. Trignac

Why do we love dead things? From "live fast, die young," to Shakespeare, to furniture with a fake patina, we have a double-edged relationship to physical decay. We like to surround ourselves with stuff that looks old. Edgar Allen Poe said that "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." Besides it's morbidity and sexism, he touches on a powerful subject.

G. Trignac

The Freudian preoccupation with Eros and Thanatos, sex and ruin, is all around us. This fascination with memento mori lies partly in the puritanical reminder that while everything dies we are here now, hanging on to life. That ruin lies just around the corner for all of us is something we enjoy being reminded of now and then, if only from a distance. "But far from nihilism, tragedy is a storyteller laying the cards on the table and asserting that even though the journey ends in a cliff, the miles are worth it for their own sake." [S. L. Wilson]

[image source]

All that death and decay making you feel frisky? You can even book your wedding at the neon boneyard in Las Vegas. This acreage in downtown Vegas is off the tourist trail, but has been a steady spot for nuptials amid the detritus of old casinos and storefronts slowly falling to dust in the desert sun.

 Beauty in Decay: The Art of Urban Exploration [Image source]

The exhibition and Book, "Beauty in Decay" showcases the photographs of "urban explorers", anonymous artists who risk police records and safety by busting into "overgrown industrial complexes, disused lunatic asylums, abandoned palaces and forgotten monasteries," recording what they see and then leaving with no trace but their footprints. 

Flickr group Abandoned Urban Decay is a pool of hundreds of great shots taken by these intrepid explorers the world over.

"There is no true Beauty without Decay"

-Uncle Monty from Withnail and I

Vicissitudes series, Jason deCaires Taylor

Jason deCaires Taylor's work wrests life from decay. His "eco-sculptures" are essentially lifeless, but they take on the living and morph into magnificent coral gardens. Ignoring the morbid preoccupation with death as an endpoint (but perhaps referencing it), deCaires Taylor emphasizes the cyclical nature of life while reminding us that 40% of the world's reefs have disappeared in recent years. But, rather than disappear in Poe's adolescent funk and hug gravestones all day, deCaires Taylor does something about it, and in the meantime creates art of the most sublime beauty.

Vicissitudes series, Jason deCaires Taylor

A New Perspective on Velazquez

Velazquez has us standing high above the action in Old Woman Cooking Eggs, but I’ve never fully understood why, though we are clearly staring down on every object in the room, the old woman’s head is out of whack in terms of linear perspective.

The boy is in correct perspective, so that we can see the top of his head (and imagine an ellipse around his hairline) in keeping with all the other objects in the room, and yet she is perfectly in profile. Why is that? The only conclusion I have is that it deliberately creates a disjointed reality. Here is this old woman cooking a meal she’s done a million times before, absent-mindedly staring away into space. The distorted perspective physically reinforces the effect that she’s psychologically not present.

Her detached gaze has often been interpreted as blindness, but I don't think that she's blind. I think it's that she seems detached due to the off-kilter angle of her head. Maybe it's down to his being barely 19 years old when he painted it and it was simply a 'happy accident', but I like to think that this is his genius on display and that it just 'felt' right. Or perhaps it was a deliberate calculation: perhaps Velazquez manipulated perspective in the same way that we might deliberately manipulate value in a painting to establish a focal point.

Drawing ellipses on some of the major shapes in the painting, and a green line across her shoulders, clearly demonstrates a horizon line that's at least at the top edge of the canvas, if not above it.

Woman teaching Geometry, 1310

This 14th Century illumination shows the personification of Geometry. I'm glad she's not teaching me about geometrical perspective, as all the objects appear to be sliding onto the ground.

Equally, in Old Woman Cooking Eggs, either the table is correct and it's the woman's head that's tipped back, or her head is correct and - like the illumination - it's the table that's tipping forward. Either way something's wrong, but oddly it all seems right.

They could almost be from two separate paintings

The Fruitseller, Vicenzo Campi (1580)

It wasn't that unusual to play around with multiple perspectives in a single painting when trying to create a point of attention. Vicenzo Campi unnaturally tips the bowls of fruit towards us for pictorial effect, despite the fact that they are clearly on a different plane than the woman and the landscape.

Since we're ripping apart masterpieces, why does is seem as though are there two separate light sources? Maybe I'm wrong, but is her face is lit from lower down than everything else? The shadows on her headscarf seem almost horizontal, and her eye is fully lit.

Linear perspective is like any other tool in painting. You can use little bits of it, or ignore it completely. It's up to you. It's a topic that a lot of painters avoid as being overly mathematical, but as Velazquez shows us with his early masterpiece, even in a rigidly constructed pictorial space there's room to be intuitive. 

Focus, Dammit!

Do we even know why we do things? How many times have I said I can't do something when what I really mean is that I don't want to. It comes down to lack of awareness. 

So, why can't you meet me? 
"Because I have to take my cat to the vet". 
What'll happen if you don't take the cat to the vet? 
"It'll crap on the bed and my girlfriend will hate me." 

Okay, so you've weighed the consequences and chosen not to meet me. There's a clear distinction here between "I have to" (meaning I have no power) and "I choose not to" (meaning I have power). We make unconscious choices in our painting practice too. 

The awesome Dan Witz

For example, we could choose to go totally nuts on a portrait and paint every last pimple and split end on Angelina Jolie's head (she must have at least one), but why bother? I mean that honestly. Fine if you do that, but know why you've chosen to. Personally, I'm impressed by photorealism from a strictly technical standpoint, but I've little interest in it artistically. I choose to paint more loosely (or maybe I just can't paint that well). But the point is that anything short of exact duplication of nature is a deliberate choice, so why choose to paint loosely in this or that passage and tightly in another?

Bellini's painting of St. Francis in the Desert coming out of his cave in utter rapture is a great example. I've stared at this painting so many times, and it's crystalline clarity still makes me dizzy. Every element in the painting is given equal focus and attention to detail. In this instance, the technique serves the painting. Bellini made a deliberate choice to spend a bazillion hours painting every last blade of grass. But why?

St. Francis has clearly spent some time in this hermitic barred cage. His back to the sun, head buried in the Book and surrounded by the trappings of Man, his awareness of the world outside is like that of Plato's cave; limited to shadows cast on the walls. 

Bellini depicts the Moment of Clarity beautifully, where St. Francis turns around and seems to experience the world and the glory of it's creation for the very first time. Leaving his cane and sandals in the cave, he walks out and appears to scrunch his toes in the gravel (who doesn't love walking on sand for the first time in summer?), almost frozen in awe with arms wide open to the  world. he almost seems skewered on a sunbolt. It reminds me of the old shamanic vision quest. There's something distinctly hallucinogenic about the landscape, and it's one of the most powerful paintings I've ever seen.

Camille Corot

Or on the other hand maybe you like the soft landscapes of Corot and might choose to paint like that, where everything is blurred, hazy and romantic. The decision doesn't have to be an overall one. You could choose to manipulate the softness of individual edges within your composition, based upon your idea for the painting. Some amount of softness makes for charm, and is extremely popular.

"Corot developed a treatment (of) looking at trees with a very wide focus. He ignored individual leaves, and resolved them into masses of tone, here lost and here found more sharply against the sky. Subordinate masses of foliage within these main boundaries are treated in the same way, resolved into masses of infinitely varying edges. This play, this lost-and-foundness at his edges is one of the great distinguishing charms of Corot's trees." [source]

Vermeer, Milkmaid (detail)

Vermeer created the softest red haze around his painted flesh which makes it seem to glow. Everything is ever so slightly out of focus, perfect for those dusty, quiet interiors.

Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (detail)

Hans Holbein rendered textures beautifully, but distinctly and with tightly bound outlines which makes them stand alone in his compositions. Whether we choose to leave the whole painting or even just a particular edge blurred or in tight focus is a matter of personal preference, but should be a conscious one. 

From the laws of human attraction to the kind of landscape we like to lay down our blanket and picnic in, there’s an innate human need for mystery. Don’t spell every last detail out for me; let me search for it. I do the same thing with my cat when I stick a treat into a rubber ball and let her find a way to get it out. We’re simple creatures, after all. J. R. R. Tolkien called it "that shimmer of suggestion that never becomes clear sight, but always hints at something deeper, further on."