sandr037

I once knew a brilliant architecture student who was working 24/7 on his thesis project.  His family took him to see a play, just to “take his mind off the project”.  On returning to the studio he said he didn’t remember much about the play, but that the design of the air handling system of the theater was so nifty that he was going to work it into his thesis project.  His family had failed - his mind had remained “on” the project.  Phryne before the Areopagus , 1861 A similar mindset often affects me when viewing paintings; I am attracted by the buildings and objects that frame the subject of the painting.  And, I am often disappointed by the crude misrepresentation of the context in an otherwise excellent painting.  In other words I ignore the nude and ogle the floor tile.  In that spirit, the following is the first of an ongoing series of posts highlighting the artists who have inspired me (with their tile work).  Pollice Verso , 1872 Jean-Leon...

You’ve probably done the same thing… Browsing through some pictures you are arrested by one image.  Among all the other splashes of color it has something – a unity that the others don’t have.  It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s MONOCHROME! Here is the picture, taken some winters ago, and forgotten.  Although it is a full color photo saved as a full color RGB Tiff file, it seems monochromatic.  All snow, all blues, very cold.  How did that happen?  Why is it so striking?  First, it happened because I took the photograph without bothering to adjust for the lighting conditions.  The camera was set for “auto white balance”, which assumed that the bluish cast of the view was normal, but was not what I experienced when I was freezing my ass off in front of the house.  The image is striking because human perception seems to enjoy the balance between the expected and the unexpected.  A familiar scene rendered in a limited range of colors will ...