"Who Do We Think We Are?"

If there was a sub-heading for my new book, this would be it. An alternative title would be, "Why I have not been blogging of late."

As anyone who's had the misfortune to be within earshot of me in a bar will know, I've been writing a book. There's not a day that goes by without me blurting it out loud on the subway in NYC on my way to work. It started out as a broad history about our attempts to describe 3-D space on 2-D canvas, but it pulled way back to become a story about how we create the idea of ourselves ... of reality, really.

I'm uploading what may end up being the first chapter. I do hope someone out there will read it. If you are that person, please let me know what you think.

I would include an introduction, but I have not written it yet. Let's just say; it's to do with outsiders, hermits, garden gnomes, weirdos, oddballs and everyone that society considers to be a kook. I believe that these people are fundamental to the conception of what civilization is.

Anyway; here it is... Please download the PDF at the link below, and you can open it on any one of your devices.

Alan

[Download free PDF book sample here]

Perspective drawings by V. Pellegrin, 1873, and Ernest Norling, 1929

Fig. 1

Okay, I get it. Perspective is boring. Especially arcane drawings from some 19th century manual by the Professor of Topography at some Military School. True, the text (which you can read here) is as thick and dense as Dermot Malone who beat me up when I was a kid, but the drawings are amazing. Take the first one (Fig. 1), for example.

It shows how to draw a square in perspective (lmno), a column in perspective (m1, n1, q1, p1), and how to draw shadows cast in perspective (v2, u2, p2) ... all in one tiny little drawing. Note that the shadows also recede. Not only do they stretch back towards the horizon, but they have their own distance point at F1, which is a theoretical point that would be way under the ground somewhere. You know where to place the shadows by marking the intersection points between lines going back from the column towards the horizon, and lines cast by the sun (above and behind) that pass through the top corners of the column (p1, q1, u1, v1) and recede to F1. Simples.

Now you can delete this email and go about your day. See you in another couple of months with some more useless info. Bye!

I admit; some might be a tad complicated. But they still look cool.

Continuing from Figure 1, this shows an obelisk in perspective and how to construct appropriate shadows.

Maybe these next ones are a bit easier to follow. They're by Ernest Norling from Perspective Made Easy (1929). Maybe I should have posted these first, but they're not as cool-looking as Pellegrin's. And besides, nobody's made it this far into the post anyway.

Exotic Recipes from Artists' Apothecaries

Run by the Quakers until it closed in 1933, the Stabler-Leadbetter Apothecary Museum is a step back in time.

Wherever I go, I collect samples of local earth. I scrape ancient statues into old film canisters with a pocketknife and keep them for my collection; the rainbow-colored sandstone of Petra is a particular favorite. I keep it in a box under my bed next to the bald eagle eggs. Relax, I'm joking. I ate those eggs ages ago. 

Swirls of color in sandstone, Petra, Jordan [Ed Trayes, photographer]

But pigment has always had a colorful history; explorers travelled to the four corners for centuries specifically to plunder color, until chemists in the 18th century wrested the practice from the hands of alchemists and their hired goons and took it indoors to the laboratory. But to this day, certain colors retain hints of their exotic past. Red ocher, for example, is a constant reminder of our stellar origins. Iron oxide is forged in the belly of dying stars that explode and scatter their contents across the galaxy. In fact, Mars still sends a kilo of it to us every day. (I wrote a whole post about it, here)

Companies like De Mairo Pigments still sell natural lapis lazuli pigment

Not content with simply smearing our canvases with dirt, we've forever ranged across the earth to uncover ever more exotic pigments. As with any modern luxury item, the rarest pigment conferred a whiff of superiority upon anyone rich enough to afford it. The expensive pigment cinnabar was conspicuously splashed all over the walls of Pompeii. We assume that they just liked the color red, or were colorblind, but in the same way that we line up to buy the latest designer excrescence, perhaps they simply had to have it because it was new and exotic. Ancient Egyptians wore lapis from Afghanistan and iron beads from Mars. Venice, by the late fifteenth century, had developed an offshoot of the apothecary specifically for artists, called vendecolori, which sold pigments like the exotic oltremare da venezia – lapis lazuli imported from the mines of Badakshan, and first described by none other than Marco Polo.(1) 

The deep saturation of "Pompeiian Red" is due to the addition of fine granules to the pigment.
Wax was applied to preserve and protect the finish.

Before this time, it was perfectly natural for artists to run down to their local Apothecary for the ingredients of their craft, but these were closer in spirit to shaman's huts than laboratories. Records of Apothecaries dating as far back as 1,500 BCE in ancient Egypt show over 800 recipes and 700 different drugs.(2) Not all of the ingredients were exotic in a "strange and alluring" way, some of them were just plain weird: By the time the Renaissance rolled around, these ingredients naturally expanded to include all sorts of herbs and ground minerals of every kind and color, soaps, cosmetics, gems such as amethyst and emeralds, oddities like “ground unicorn horn” (rhinoceros horn that came through Spain from Africa), tobacco (also through Spain in the fifteenth century), sulfur, mercury, the skin of roasted vipers, dried earthworms and human faeces (most prized being those of young children), bizarre elixirs and, of course, illegal poisons like arsenic and hemlock: Shakespeare’s Romeo picked up the poison he used to kill himself from an apothecary. 

Victorian Medicine Case [source]

Combine this with the practice (for certain illustrators of Islamic illuminated texts) of making the finest brushes from hairs gathered from the inside throats of kittens, and it's easy to see why artists were traditionally looked at sideways. As for me, I'll stick to ordering from the catalog.

Recommended reading:

"Color," Victoria Finlay, Random House

"Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments," Abrams Discoveries

(1) “Vendecolori a Venezia: the reconstruction of a Profession,” ­Louisa C. Matthew, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 144, No. 1196 (Nov., 2002), pp. 680-686
(2) “A History of Pharmaceutical Compounding. Secundum Artem ,” Allen, Jr, Lloyd, Volume 11 Number 3.

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.

The Ideal City

A staggeringly boring 'Ideal' cityscape by Fra Carnevale

The idea that an ‘ideal city’ is even possible is a tantalizing dream born of a desire to escape our current situation, wipe the slate clean and start afresh. It’s part of the reason colonizers get so glassy-eyed when it comes to setting up shop in a newly colonized space; the attempt to transcribe the perfect world that exists in our imagination into real bricks and mortar has excited both creativity and hubris for ages, from cave-painters to conquistadores. The downside - that you can’t just run away from human nature - hasn’t failed to excite its own brand of dystopian creativity too, where writers and artists have pointed out just what a disaster these utopian delusions invariably turn out to be. 

Vitruvius, Plan of an Ideal City

From hippy communes to Brasilia, the attempt to corral people into synchronous alignment is like trying to stop a spinning drill bit with your lips: You’re welcome to give it a shot, but it’ll end in tears. At the end of the day, we monkeys don’t like to share our banana. The synonymy between “idea” and “ideal” means that, by definition, a thought must stay in our heads if it’s to remain perfect, because as soon as it turns into action it is reduced and corrupted by the physical world. 

Renaissance ideal cities inspired by Vitruvius (15th-16th c.) 1. Filarete, 2. Fra Giocondo, 3. Girolamo Maggi, 4. Giorgio Vasari, 5. Antonio Lupicini, 6. Daniele Barbaro, 7.  Pietro Cattaneo, 8/9 di Giorgio Martini. [source]

Werner Herzog’s documentary, “Encounters at the End of the World,” has its share of misfits and oddballs all drawn like lemmings to the polar research station at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, in some ill-conceived attempt to “get away,” only to end up living in closer proximity with other oddballs than they ever would have if they’d just stayed back home. What sustains and enables them to stay cooped up inside for months on end is simply the idea of all that space around them, far away from the big bad world, demonstrating the power of a good concept to overwrite empirical reality. 

From Hugh Ferris’s “The Metropolis of Tomorrow” (1929)

Plato would argue that Ideal Forms are not just in our heads, that they have a very real existence outside of space and time, and that they are the models from which our world is built. They prevent us from sinking into depravity and weekend marathons of Duck Dynasty by reminding us that we are better than that; that as we careen through life we should be more honest, more courageous, more compassionate. 

Which one is the Golden Rectangle?

Imagine that you are floating inside the center of a very large transparent sphere, like Leonardo’s Vitruvian man above. The yellow area is our normal 60º field of undistorted view. Outside of that yellow field, things start getting weird. Our binocular vision receives two sets of images (our overlapping yellow circles in the illustration above), and sends them back to the brain for processing via the curved camera lenses of our eyes. Through comparison between these two images and a little high-speed triangulation our brains tell us how far away things are. Harry Moss Traquair described our visual field in 1927 as, "an island of vision surrounded by a sea of blindness." 

Numerous studies by “Golden Sectionists” trying to prove Man’s natural attraction towards the Golden Rectangle have found that people are just as likely to choose any horizontal rectangle that roughly conforms to the one that circumscribes the yellow shape, above [Or roughly 1:1.5, and not the Golden Ratio of 1:1.618]. 

Which one is the Golden Recatngle?

Our natural affinity for this shape is possibly its relation to our undistorted field of vision and not, after all, anything to do with nautilus shells. See if you can pick out the Golden Rectangle from the group of quadrilaterals, above. 

[I'll put the answer in the comments, below]