Painting with Pixels

Khang Le

Hollywood has been snapping up the best and brightest talent as Concept Artists for years. Their work is some of the most creative, thought-provoking and imaginative work out there. Long having adapted to the 21st Century tool-kit of a Wacom tablet and painting software, the best Concept Artists display a deft lightness of hand, a fearless use of color and a true artist's eye, seamlessly moving from traditional to digital media and back again.

Michael Kutsche

Michael Kutsche

At the advent of digital painting, there was perhaps the temptation to try and mimic the look of the brushwork of traditional artists such as Frank Frazetta, but digital artists quickly swept aside criticism of the "digital look" of their art and embraced the technology, being perfectly at home in the new world of pixels and light. The quick-fire pace of creating commercial artwork for Gaming and Hollywood was perhaps a key factor in the development of the new style of digital painting, lending itself as it does to on-a-dime changes and rapid turnaround.

Paul Lasaine

Paul Lasaine, Art Director for Lord of the Rings, writes a fantastic blog, with lots of artwork and Photoshop tutorials, as does Feng Zhu. I love that each of these incredible artists is so willing to share their knowledge.

Perfectly suited for adaptation as Children's murals, book illustrations, or just worthy due to their jaw-dropping beauty and technical artistry, I love to stare at these and marvel at the staggering talent of these artists.

Feng Zhu

Feng Zhu

Feng Zhu

Feng Zhu

 I love the NC Wyeth coloring of this scene by artist Dermot Power 

Dermot Power

Bas-Relief Art in the 21st Century

Dutch artist Ron van der Ende creates low relief wall-mounted sculptures from salvaged wood. His bas-relief works are incredible constructions that are equal parts optical illusion and trompe l'oeil foolery, intricate experiments in form and artistic textural works of visceral impact.

 "I collect old doors and stuff. Old painted wood that I find in the street. I take it apart and skin it to obtain a 3mm thick veneer with the old paint layers still intact. I construct bas-reliefs that I cover with these veneers much like a constructed mosaic. I do not paint them!"

On the rare occasion he can't find the right color, he visits a warehouse near Rotterdam that stores more than 7,000 old doors. "An afternoon in there with a good flashlight will usually get me exactly what I need," says Van Der Ende.

From a Huffington Post article on Top 10 Artists to Watch: "These are complex and intriguing works that need to be viewed in person. The raw nature of the work is difficult, if not impossible, to fully appreciate from photographs, as the three-dimensional illusion created becomes weakened and the exquisite craftsmanship of on-site construction goes undetected. One of the most fascinating aspects of these wall sculptures is the manner in which they are put together. The technique celebrates the grand tradition of a complex theater backstage rigging of supports and frames, or a movie set of false fronts on Main Street reminiscent of a recreated ghost town."

 
Where do his ideas come from? "Anything to feed a stream of ideas; scrapbooks, vintage catalogs, image banks. The internet is great for me but so are flea markets."

Cuban artist Elsa Mora creates her own variety of bas-relief out of cut paper.

Calvin Nichols also uses cut paper to create low relief art.

Michael Zelehoski

Michael Zelehoski

Michael Zelehoski incorporates wooden crates, pallets, and chairs into his art, flattening them in an innovative process and rendering what was a three-dimensional object onto a flat plane.

"I deconstruct the objects, cutting them into sometimes hundreds of abstract fragments before reassembling the pieces two-dimensionally. The negative space is filled with carefully fitted pieces of wood, creating a solid plane in which the object is trapped in a parody of its former perspective. The object’s concreteness is in direct contrast to the spatial illusionism of its composition not to mention the perceived autonomy of the picture plane."

Anne Vallayer Coster, and Bas-Relief Imité

Bouquet of Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, with Peaches and Grapes, by Anne Vallayer-Coster

Despite the fatuous and dreamy description by Jules de Goncourt of the eighteenth century as being "the century of woman and her caressing domination over manners and custom," there is evidently some truth to the notion that women wielded influence over politics, culture, government and art at that time. Elizabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun spoke of her glory days in her memoirs, saying that "Woman reigned then: the Revolution dethroned them."

Detail from Bouquet of Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, with Peaches and Grapes

In the court of Marie-Antoinette, there were three reigning women artists. Along with Vigée L Brun and Adélaide Labille-Guiard, Anne Vallayer-Coster was one of the most prominent still-life painters of the day.

Bouquet of Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, with Peaches and Grapes (above) displays her mastery of different genres. In it we can see her combining elements of flower painting, still life and bas-relief imités. While her flowers are rendered in layers of delicate glazes, her terracotta vase is treated alla prima, with opaque paint and low impasto.

Perhaps no other eighteenth-century French artist rivaled Vallayer-Coster's facility in painting in a range of styles, particularly in the decorative genres of still life and flower painting.  Although I find her portraits to be weak, she elevated the traditional genre of flower painting to create works of exceptional refinement. I also believe her work as a trompe l'oeil painter has perhaps not fully been appreciated, so I'm concentrating here on some of those paintings.

Amazingly, she produced some of her most beautiful and masterly paintings before she applied to the Académie, at a time when she had neither frequented an academician's atelier nor even studied at the Académie.

When painting her bas-relief imités, she first roughly sketched the forms with a liquid brown paint that served to delineate features and shadows. She then used impasto for highlights to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. I also love her trompe l'oeil frames, and the way her fauness rests her hooves on it in the painting above.

Her painted bas-reliefs were based on actual works by artists such as Clodion

Given that Vallayer-Coster produced many versions of these scenes, there must have been a high demand for this type of work at the time. A second version of the same scene is shown in the painting is below.

Although she was clearly influenced by Chardin in her still life work, I hope you can see that with joyful paintings such as these, she never fell into slavish imitation. Her technique reflects that of an artist finding her own way, while epitomizing the highest expression of Rococo elegance.

Bas-relief imité was common in Still Life painting, as in this excellent work by Gerard van Spaendonck

The Art of Color Reproduction

Most of us these days use Google as our main source when researching new projects. It's an invaluable resource for sure, but consider the issue of fidelity: How can we be sure that we are seeing color the way it is in the original?

Anthony Van Dyck's portrait of Cornelius Van Der Geest is a classic. Like many artists, I've attempted to copy it myself. I immediately noticed a huge variation in color chroma and value between the many images available online. It's a bit of a head-scratcher.

My 'copy' of Cornelius Van Der Geest, by Anthony Van Dyck

I put copy in quotes above because all we can really hope for is a kind of composite melting-pot of a painting. A tiny few of us have the opportunity to sit next to an original when attempting a copy. The rest have to make do with the largest reproduction we can find in the archives, either in print or - more frequently these days - through a Google Image search.

Visual Hint took this concept much further, researching the many variations of classic paintings and re-arranging them into collages to demonstrate the huge variety of color and even shape available online. The uneven edges demonstrate the available crops of the original.

Danae, by Gustav Klimt [Image: Visual Hint]

Though photographic color reproduction of artwork has advanced tremendously in recent years, anyone out there who collects Art books will know that there was a Dark Age in print quality roughly from the 1920s through the 1970s. Unless I see that a book contains line drawings or lithographs, I hardly pay any attention to Art books of that period: What's the point of printing poor black & white or washed-out color photographs of art? We want color, and lots of it!

Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer [Image: Visual Hint]

Writing about the limitations inherent in historic source material, Roger W. Moss tells us that "books such as Exterior Decoration, Century of Color, and Victorian Exterior Decoration, based primarily on historic photographs...have certain inherent problems." Researchers of 17th and 18th Century paint colors had little to rely on in terms of printed reproductions of color, they simply had to go straight to the source. However, "the student of nineteenth century paints has first a trickle, then a flood of rich visual documents." That's good news for the researcher, or is it?

Some issues worth considering when researching 'Historic colors':

• Early books had plates that were hand-colored, which of course could never be precise. Even if the colors themselves were not subject to fugitive changes and fading, the paper underneath turned brown and changed the overall effect.

• The advent of color lithographs in the 19th century advanced the process, but the color separations were done by eye and there was a fair degree of room for variations and differences between copies and editions.

• Readers in the 19th century were cautioned by publishers to work from paint chips rather than plates when selecting colors. There is no such disclaimer on Google!

• The actual paint chips contained in some books were subject to the same discoloration found in samples removed from historic structures. Verdigris sometimes turned a very dark brown, for example. I doubt if Mount Vernon would look have the same impact if we relied on paint chips alone.

• The problems were compounded when modern printers reproduced those reproductions on an inked drum.

• 19th century photographic film was less sensitive to reds and yellows. A print rendered from one of these negatives would yield much darker yellows than modern film, and reds would appear virtually black.

Not to mention that color 'correction' software is misleading: You're still looking at pixels and light, not paint, after all. Combine that with endlessly variable differences in Monitors and desktop printers, and the photo editor's preference for hitting the 'Auto Levels' and 'Auto Color' button in Photoshop, and we have a disaster in the making.

Truth, as we know, is relative, and the photographic record is as manufactured as memory. It seems that History is a matter of what we settle on as being the generally accepted view. The victor turns out to be the one who simply turns up at the top of Page One in a Google Image search.

Les Monuments De Paris, Joseph Dufour

Panoramic murals are about as Romantic an idealized vision of nature as you can get. The section above is from a huge room wrap that I painted on canvas for a client in Europe. Except for the glaring errors in perspective (two horizon lines? seriously?), I was really happy with the result, and jumped at the opportunity to produce a new mural based on the classic woodblock printed 'papier peint' Les Monuments De Paris, by Dufour et Cie (1814).

The goal of these wonderful panels was "to stir emotions through the amazement and bewilderment at the "magical" effect of the spectacle of nature, experienced as a maze in which one gets delightfully lost" [Odile Nouvel-Kammerer].

Les Monuments De Paris, detail

Les Monuments was a perfect example of an idealized vision of bucolic nature and artificiality. The buildings of Paris are unrealistically aligned beside each other, next to a perfectly horizontal river (the Seine, without a single bridge?!). You can easily picture the encircling effect created by the installed panels. You the viewer are sitting on an island refuge peopled by relaxing images of a Romanticized rural life, separated from the city in the background by a calmly flowing river.

It's no wonder works like these from the manufactories of Dufour, Zuber and Desfossé were instantly popular. That's to say nothing of the extraordinary workmanship that went into their making.

The process of production is fascinating, each panel employing hundreds of individually carved wooden blocks that were inked and printed with separate colors. It's hard to conceive of the amount of time it must have taken to produce a full set of these intricately carved blocks for all the panels. Historian Kathryn Kane tells us that

"In many cases, the same wood blocks which had been carved at the beginning of the century were still used for the papers produced at mid-century. In light of the huge investment in carving all those blocks, this made much economic sense. However, the French paper-stainers were aware of changing fashions and reflected those changes in their scenic papers. For example, The Monuments of Paris set was re-issued several times, and each time any significant new buildings in Paris were added and any which had been demolished were removed. "

The catalog raisonné in French Scenic Wallpaper 1795-1865 shows one set of panels for Les Monuments, but the set I have included here has marked differences, and not just in the architecture. Figures on horseback, ladies strolling by the riverbank; a lot has changed. It was apparently common to make such detailed adjustments. "The small figures of the people strolling about the city were given new costumes in keeping with current fashions."

Les Monuments De Paris, 26 of the 30 original panels

They were masterfully colored, but interestingly for the artist, employed very few pigments. A spectroscopic analysis of the pigments used in the production determined that;

"All the colour shades observed in [Les Monuments De Paris] were manufactured with the pigments red, iron oxide yellow, iron oxide Prussian blue, Scheele's green, raw sienna, burnt sienna, lead white, carbon black, vermilion (HgS), minium (Pb₃O₄), CaCO₃"

Once completed, the panels had to be shipped. There was no Fedex in 1814. "Each set of papers intended for shipment abroad was very meticulously packaged. Once each roll was completed, it was carefully wrapped, first in paper and then in tin foil. All the rolls of the set were then placed in a water-tight container, usually a barrel, ready to be loaded aboard the ship which would carry them to the United States."

Or wherever they were to be hung. I can imagine the horse-drawn carriage full of barrels of wallpaper crossing the Pyrenees and pulling up at some castle in the Basque country.

Les Monuments De Paris, detail

According to Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz (a veteran dealer in decorative papier peints), wood-block panels such as these are "an extraordinary feat in printmaking". Well we knew that, but how much do they sell for these days? That's what we really want to know.

At last year's Palm Beach fair, Thibaut-Pomerantz sold a large panel from manufacturer Joseph Dufour's scenic "Monuments of Paris" (1812) for $65,000. In general, she notes, a fragment will go for $3,000 to $5,000, a good-size panel, $12,000 to $50,000; an exceptional, complete scenic can command as much as $200,000. Even at that price, she points out, they are "very affordable in relation to other works of art."

Les Monuments De Paris, detail

Of course, they weren't always so pricey. In fact, they were developed through the first half of the Nineteenth Century as "an affordable alternative to tapestries or to the hand-painted fresco". Indeed, the Victoria and Albert Museum lists an original price of 50 Francs for the paper.

My version is still in the planning and estimation stages, but I really hope this goes through. It's going to be a lot of fun to paint this!

The last word goes to Ms. Kane: "What could be more soothing to the soul than a room in one’s home in which one could contemplate an idealized and perfect landscape?"

Ornamental Ceiling Drawings, 1877

I came across this folio of original French lithographs from 1877, containing these wonderful drawings of designs for painted ceilings.I hope you like them! I posted a larger set of these lithographs on my Flickr page here. Don't forget to download the 'Original Size'.

An Instinct for Beauty

Harvesters, by Breughel

What makes a landscape beautiful? What is it about the Hudson River painters that appeals so much? Why does Constable still speak to us, or Levitan or Brueghel for that matter? Of course, the fact that they are incredible painters helps. 


Our idea of what constitutes Beauty in humans has already been linked with Symmetry and The Golden Ratio. We find symmetry and proportion in the human face attractive on a gut level because they provide unconscious cues to the sexual health of a prospective mate. It's the old Greek ideal. But what is Beauty in the natural landscape?

The view from Mount Holyoke, by Thomas Cole

In History of Beauty, Umberto Eco tried to persuade us that every historical era had its own ideas about beauty that are culturally based. From the middle of the Twentieth Century, art theorists tended to interpret art in terms of the historic and cultural context of its production; a kind of Nurture over Nature.


Recently, however, a different idea has been revived: Could it be that we have a universal instinct that literally compels us to respond to certain elements in a landscape?

"I know this sounds crazy, but ever since yesterday on the road, I've been seeing this shape. Shaving cream, pillows...Dammit! I know this. I know what this is! This means something. This is important!"

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roy Neary finds himself compelled to form a mountain out of a plate of mashed potato thanks to a kind of implanted vision. It turns out that we too could be "sharing a common vision" like the people who showed up at Devil's Tower in Spielberg's classic movie.  


There is a theory that something similar happens in our brains when we observe the natural landscape. Evolutionary Psychology suggests that there are certain universal truths answering the age old question, "What is Beauty?" It's called the 'savannah hypothesis.'

Golden Autumn, by Isaak Levitan

Pastoral Landscape by Asher Durand

For hundreds of thousands of generations, proto-humans lived in the Pleistocene savannah. We learned to instantly recognize certain cues to the appropriateness for survival of one landscape over all others. Over time, goes the theory, nature selected those humans who could spot a suitable hunting ground or a good place to settle down for the night. Dutton says that "over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable."


Our mental capacities, inclinations, and desires were definitively shaped in those millions of years. These features were fully developed since the last 10,000 years, when human beings developed agriculture and cities, metal tools and writing. Our brains have changed little, if at all, since then [all the more remarkable when you consider our capacity to understand Physics, or the era of the Computer, for example]. We've only been tied to this modern era of cities for a blip on the cosmic timescale, and our brains are still very much mired in Stone-Age notions of what constitutes a 'beautiful landscape'.


Whether we consider the human eye, our upright walk, or our appreciation of landscape, they are each informed by natural selection working on the evolution of our simian brains.

Certain landscape elements shown to be universally preferred:

• A blue sky
 Stable weather is important.

• A pathway, or trail.

Landscapes that aid and encourage exploration are preferred over landscapes that hinder these needs. We like easy access, but also we like to know that we can escape back up that track if we need to.

• Mystery
A hint of interesting features that could be discovered. 'Uncertainty' is a key element in our everyday lives. Complete certainty in everything is the death of the spirit. In landscapes, we like our trails to lead around a bend, enticing us to explore. 

• 'Optimal complexity'
The landscape needs to be complex, but not so complex as to be 'unreadable.' We show highest preference for landscapes at the middling level of complexity.

• Security

Just as 'uncertainty' is important, so too (paradoxically) is 'certainty'. We want to feel safe from threat or harm.

• Trees that fork near the ground

We like to see trees branching close to the ground, which provide a quick means of escape should we need to dash up one to escape a predator. We have also been shown to prefer copses, or intermittent tree coverage, in our landscapes. 

• Open spaces of low grasses

It's easier to track and hunt if you have space to run. Our ancestors ran for hours after their quarry, literally exhausting them until they could flee no more, and simply dropped in their tracks.

• Rolling hills

Like the savannah from which we came, we prefer some undulations in our landscapes. They tell us that the land will be dry enough to camp on, and that the hills will also provide a good vantage point for safety or hunting, and multiple escape routes. It also ties in with our preference for mystery: stimulating the imagination and the desire to know "what's over the hill". 

• Natural environments over built environments

We consistently show a preference for nature over, say, a cityscape.

• Animals

Studies generally leave animals out of test photographs because they skew preference scores -  it is known that we overwhelmingly prefer the presence of animals. After all; a man's got to eat. Notice those cattle in the Asher Durand painting? Of course you did; It was the first thing you saw.

• Borders

We like to see a border or edge that can be followed for some miles. It breaks the landscape into large chunks for us, making it easier to make quick assessments about lurking threats or dangers, and the potential resources available.

• Landmarks for orienting

Wouldn't want to get lost if a mist or dust-storm rolls in.


• Evidence of water
A mix of wet and dry land implying distinct and reliable seasons, and of course, a reliable source of drinking water (for us, and for our prey).

"There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful." John Constable

"The needs of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were the same as our current needs - to find adequate food and water and to protect themselves from the physical environment, predators, and hostile conspecifics." [Evolved responses to landscapes. Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby (1992)]


Look again at the examples of paintings I've shown here. Some, or all, of the elements I've mentioned as essential are present in each of them.

"The magnificent beauty of the natural world is a manifestation of 

the mysterious natural laws that will be forever obscured from us." 

- Albert Bierstadt

An article in Ethology and Sociobiology (Mealy and Theis,1995) explored the relationship between mood and landscape preference across individuals:

"We predicted that subjects who reported positive moods (e.g., cheerful, energetic, optimistic) would be motivated to explore, and thus, would prefer landscapes rich in “Prospect” (vast expanses and overviews), while subjects who experienced mood dysphoria (e.g., tense, depressed, fatigued) would be motivated to reduce stress, and thus, prefer landscapes rich in “Refuge” (enclosed, protected spaces). While not all of the predictions were confirmed, in general, landscape preferences were found to relate to mood in the manner predicted."

So, while the Romantics like Byron and Shelley might have enjoyed the epic mystery of a Bierstadt or Friedrich landscape, the Intellectuals (or Realists/Rationalists - whatever you want to label them) among us prefer to gaze out a window at an English rose garden with a gazebo. They may seem different, but both concepts of what constitutes beauty in nature are defined by the same imperatives. The Romantics simply are giving precedence to the notion that a landscape must contain mystery (or "Prospect"), while the 'intellectuals' respond positively to nature when they feel secure from threat ("Refuge").

"This harsh and splendid land

With snow-covered rock mountains, cold-crystal streams,

Deep forests of cypress, juniper and ash,

Is as much my body as what you see before you here. 

I cannot be separated from this or from you. 

Our many hearts have only a single beat."

- From The Warrior Song of King Gezar

Mont St. Victoire, by Cézanne

Perhaps, like hamsters running tirelessly on a treadmill, we are gripped by a distant memory of our ancestral homeland when we stop in front of a vista and exclaim "wow, now that's beautiful."

"Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me." Corot

"America's Most Wanted", by Komar and Melamid

Komar and Melamid are two Russian artist emigrés who undertook a fascinating project. Their book, Painting by Numbers, explains that "with the help of The Nation Institute and a professional polling team, they discovered that what Americans want in art, regardless of class, race, or gender, is exactly what the art world disdains--a tranquil, realistic, blue landscape."


Once they received the general consensus, they painted the result. The painting above is what Americans prefer to see, complete with a historic figure (George Washington), deer, and children. It's an ugly amalgamation for sure, but it is quite revealing of the aesthetic preferences of the general populace. One thing that immediately strikes me is that it looks absolutely nothing like what the Art World tells us is 'good art.' Although, I do suspect (like Arthur Danto) that most people would rather not actually hang this on their wall. I know I wouldn't like to.


Not content to stop there, the duo polled countries from all over the World. The results are in (and not a surprise): People the world over tend to prefer a strikingly similar landscape. The elements we have laid out earlier are all there. What does this tell us about aesthetics and human evolution? The argument has been made that the results are an aberration due to the ubiquity of Hallmark calendars in all the countries polled - that the results have been skewed. I like to think that the ubiquity of Hallmark calendars is exactly the proof we're looking for: Hallmark is everywhere precisely because that's what we prefer to look at.


Komar and Melamid have just laid out Hallmark's market research for them, and Evolutionary Psychology has backed it up: The experience of beauty belongs to our evolved human psychology.