B-ob

Seeing Egyptian wall painting

admin — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:17:04 +0000

Link: The watcher and an alternative visual metaphor.

Trying to appreciate Ancient Egyptian painting is often crippled by our modern expectations of painting and what makes an artist “good.” In this short piece, I have attempted to help the novice viewer look at the paintings in the way they may have been intended to be seen.

Ancient Egypt 2 - Animated space

admin — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 09:14:31 +0000

These are pages that I haven’t recently written about my views on first how we may change our perspective about how to look at ancient Egyptian painting and second an analysis of my favorite wall painting.

Shadows: Bumps and Dents

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:26:17 +0000

Have you noticed that it has become almost imperative that each site have at least one graphic, text or image, that casts a shadow? Thanks to Photoshop® and many other image editors, it’s as easy as clicking a link and pressing OK to create this effect. So now, almost anybody can sprinkle their site with images and text that seem to magically float above the page. Although, floating text is eye catching, it doesn’t add much to our understanding of an illustration and often just adds clutter to the presentation. However, properly used, cast shadows can be a powerful element to clarify the relationship between spatial illusions. For instance, shadows can be used to determine whether we are looking at a bump or a dent.

To fake volume on a flat page, the designer relies on the viewer’s experience in the real world. If something, even minutely, fails to conform to the viewer’s real world experience, the illusion will fail. The viewer may not understand why a shadow looks wrong but she does know what works. So what do we know about shadows that will determine what’s a bump and what’s a dent?

Local Greens

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:53:38 +0000

Sitting out in the yard on a beautiful breezy warm day listening to the wind chimes, I started thinking about how many variations of green I was seeing. It occurred to me that the different greens might be a good way to define what I mean when I use the term local color. I got out my camera and took pictures of several plants and trees. I downloaded the images into PhotoShop® and cropped out areas that were fairly uniformly green. I then found the extreme values within the cropped images and created a gradation. Finally, I found the approximate middle point of the gradation and created a square of average color. The result is below.

Since I was pretty close to the trees and shrubs when I took the pictures, there is no smoke or fog or water vapor in the air to diminish the color’s brightness. Also by averaging out the light and dark in the bottom squares, I removed the variation in color that is the result of part of an object being in the sun and the rest being in shadow. The color that is left is pretty much the color of the plant - its local color.

Why Ancient Egypt?

admin — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:35:08 +0000

I remember when it started. I was looking at a reproduction of an ancient tomb painting that had been hanging in my studio for years. The tomb wall it had been copied from was missing several sections and had been deliberately vandalized. The copyist had restored some of the missing sections in a lighter color which, though sensitively done, disrupted the original’s color scheme. At the best, I was looking at an image that was many huge steps distant from the original. It is, after all, a printed reproduction of a painted copy of a damaged and restored fresco painting that was over 3000 years old. But, even so, the original design was so attractive that it managed to shine through all of the damage, the additions, and centuries of neglect. I was convinced that this was a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian painting. But as I looked at it on that particular evening, I was startled to realize, for the first time in all those years, that the composition represented a shallow depth as well as an exquisite pattern of shapes. I was intrigued by this discovery because I had been led to believe that Egyptian designers were not interested in creating depth. Though the occasional craftsman might paint an object or an animal that seemed to show a small amount of sculptural form, this was an exception to the general focus on flatness and was rarely seen in known tomb paintings and even more rarely seen in those paintings that depicted people. And yet here were three rows of workers distributed in an intentional three dimensional space in the tomb of a highly place Egyptian bureaucrat.

How was I seeing this depth? Why had it been so hard to notice? Did this illusion occur in other Egyptian paintings? What tomb was this painting from and when was it painted? I was excited. Had I found a new way to look at Egyptian art? I had some questions to answer.

I’ve been answering these questions for myself for the last several years. Now I would like to share some of my ideas and perhaps create some discussion. I’ll start by creating some background information about topics listed below. I would appreciate your comments.

Space in Painting - Several essays outlining how the illusion of depth is created on a two dimensional surface.

Tomb Painting - Ideas from my research and thoughts about the function of wall paintings in ancient Egyptian tombs

Rekhmira - An inspection of the specific tomb from which the copy was made.

Whatever…

admin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:43:42 +0000

At the beginning of my fourth week of retirement, I have not yet felt the urge to return to regular employment. So far I have had the opportunity to refuse two offers. After many years of feeling it was imperative to remain gainfully employed, refusing work seems a bit cavalier if not anti-protestant. But I have firmly decided to wait for at least a few months before choosing to re-insert myself in the workplace - or not.

Changes
I have noticed that since my activities are no longer dictated by a nine to five, thank God it’s Friday schedule, I’m often awake and active at any given hour on any day of the week. For example, it is presently 6AM on Saturday.

I haven’t missed the society of my colleagues, yet, but I’m sure this is only because I have always taken a few weeks off during this part of the summer and not seeing them at this time of the year is normal.

I’m very glad to say I still have no plans to travel or to begin the great American novel. Presently, my plan is to do “this and that” and see what emerges. Since I thrive on task completion, I’m not overly comfortable in this waiting state. But I’m determined to simply soldier on until I can separate what are left-over job habits or reaction to these habits from my real interests.

The “welcome to…” page

admin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:50:12 +0000

After following other blogs and even commenting on occasion, I decided to create my own. These are my thoughts, put down as they occur, about post secondary education, Egyptian wall painting, and the creation of three dimensional space in drawing and painting. As I learn something or explain a concept a-fresh, I hope you will share my excitement but I don’t promise that there will be an orderly arrangement of ideas and instruction on these pages.

Click on the RSS feed symbol in the upper right corner if you would like to get updates as they are available.

Oh yeah! If you do decide to join me - welcome.

Bob