What Artists Notice
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For me the breakthrough was when I realized that the colors I think I see in the world are all lies. Try this: look at something near you that's a uniform color. Looks like one color, right? Wrong! Light hits the object, and bounces off in a million different ways depending on physics. Your brain interprets these light rays as a single composite color for each object, but it's not the physical truth - it's just a simplification to deal with overwhelming detail. If you want proof of this, just look at what a digital camera sees. Pixels that the brain would consider the same color... aren't.
A big part of the artist's journey, perhaps the main part, is in developing the ability to break through the brain's natural conceptual abstraction layer and see the world much closer to the sensory raw data that normally goes unnoticed. Ironically, the better an artist manages to reproduce these low-level details, the more their work will seem obvious and like something anyone could do!
Every object reflects different frequencies of light to different degrees, as I imagine you know. If you think of the range of frequencies in the visible light spectrum, you can construct for any object the “spectral power distribution” (SPD) that says how much light is reflected for a given frequency. So far so good.
But we don’t see “frequencies” of light. An object that reflects only yellow and an object that reflects red and green but no yellow will look the same to us, despite the fact that they are reflecting completely different light, thanks to the way humans perceive light. In fact, there is an infinite variety of different SPDs that to humans look like exactly the same color — called metamers — for any given color we perceive.
A color is an equivalence class, not a point on a spectrum.
Ok, I concur, I was probably not aware that color mixing is a human physiology thing and not a physics thing.
So to clarify, when we mix red and green playdough as kids, what happens is all the little particulates/molecules interweave together, but each is reflecting a different signal. And when that variation/entropy back-and-forth between red and green is too high, the brain just melds them to yellow?
Not “melds them”: it is yellow. A specific yellow, to a human, is any of the SPDs that triggers the same amount of “red” and “green” cone activity. It’s not some kind of brain interpretation trick, it’s literally the same signals reported by your eyes.
human_eyes.input(emit_light(580))
-> ((0.5, 0.5, 0), "Pure Yellow")
human_eyes.input(emit_light([[650, 0.3456], [550, 0.4567], [450, 0.0]]))
-> ((0.5, 0.5, 0), "Pure Yellow")
human_eyes.input(emit_light([[670, 0.00625], [640, 0.03125], ... [450, 0.0]]))
-> ((0.5, 0.5, 0), "Pure Yellow")
... because input is a list but output is a weighted average in a single 3D vector.
I find this hard to believe because Unity recently released a digital human demo far more realistic than this painting, yet HN attacked it for having slightly unrealistic teeth lighting.
The answer to this actually affects my work; I do UI design, and I've always assumed that when engineers implement my designs a little off, it's because they didn't think the details were important. If it's because they actually don't see the difference at all, that's an easier problem to solve.
Great artists don't just notice and represent (and abstract) details, they frame them in a context which is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Van Eyck isn't really photorealistic. It wasn't possible to paint true photorealism back then because you need modern pigments and media to do that. But it isn't even what Van Eyck was trying to do.
The painting is really about a story, and the details are there to make the story feel more vivid. There's certainly an element of exploring representation and technique for its own sake. But the point of the painting is the story it tells - the experience it creates - not whether the dog's fur and the mirror are perfectly rendered.
It's very difficult to get engineers to think in terms of viewer/user experience. Engineer brains are focussed on solving technical problems and creating tools, not on creating delightful or captivating experiences for non-engineers.
Business people can be slightly better at experiences, but there's always the shady temptation to create manipulative and exploitative experiences.
The arts are the only place where the audience experience is the main point of the exercise. Technical skill is only ever a means to an end, and if the end doesn't work on its own terms the technical skill is irrelevant.
Take the highlights of the beads - it's that contrast between light and dark in that precise context that draws the eye to the glass shapes draped against the wall. The dog contains a different kind of detail - the gentle strokes of fur give it a sense of being organic, and the glint in the eye gives it a sense of being alive.
The skill and care lies in both being able to see these details, and understand what the affect of them is. Of course, then there's the discipline required to pay the right sort of attention to these details while engaged in the cognitively heavy task of rendering. Painting takes an enormous amount of focus on material - especially in a time when one had to mix their own colors from a pretty paltry set of naturally available pigments (relatively speaking).
If I were to take this approach to UI design, I would be focused on the experience of the user as they interacted with a UI (perhaps this is why the term UX is everywhere) - what is the first thing the eye is drawn to? What extra steps are introduced by such-and-such widget? Is there a feeling of intuitiveness and does the interface flow naturally with the purpose of the tool?
When it comes to engineers implementing designs "off" - that's most likely a communication issue. They may not understand why X detail is important.
For instance say you add a fancy, colored, layered shadow to a button. If you point out “hey this shadow is 4 layers, 4 shades of red, with these different blurs and spreads” etc, and they don’t implement it, then I’d think they (a) don’t think those details matter, (b) ran out of time, (c) don’t have the CSS chops to know how to implement it (or b+c, ran out of time looking for how to do it).
On the other hand if the design is presented as a beautiful mock-up with all these fine details, but lacking specific call-outs, I wouldn’t be surprised if many engineers miss the finer details.
The walk from the prayer beads to the mirror honestly blew my mind in a way I wasn't expecting and I've looked at that painting before. In just a few words he handed me the keys to a type of active viewing that has been difficult for me.
See:
- https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-optical-device-ja...
- https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-03287031/file/VanEyckPerspe...
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-31903-2_...
even just knowing what you're looking at is a process of un-training your brain, a good art education actually starts from learning to see "correctly" and unsee all the shortcuts that your brain takes.
It's also possible that Van Eyck may have perceived the world the same way we do, and the inclusion of small details such as the beads came only due to his artistic choice of tools. Conversely if you were trained to the same tool for sketching you would be forced to include the beads by way of process -- even if you had not noticed them before.
When I was first considering getting a BFA (in my late 30s) I thought my inability to photographically reproduce scenes using pencils and other traditional media precluded my going to art school... but I still gathered my courage, front-loaded my portfolio with what I thought was my strongest work— very polished photography— and scheduled a “do I even stand a chance here” portfolio consultation.
I swallowed hard when the interviewer (gruffly) introduced himself as a professor in the fine art photography program. He cooly disregarded shots I thought were most impressive— a perfectly composed and finished shot of a huge lightning bolt over a brick victorian cathedral shot from a fifth floor outdoor vantage point a few blocks away with a full frame DSLR; some long exposure shots of really grand views in a city; a few others. ‘Ah, yes. Very pretty. Doesn’t say much about you though, non?’ But as soon as he got through those and got to the ones I threw in there to pad things out, he started to pay more attention.
One-for-one, he was most interested in the ones I liked the most. I did not even take most on a ‘real’ camera, I took them on my phone... Abstract shapes made by overlapping subway bars. A smashed pile of dropped beer glasses at the bar I worked at. A guy in a suit sitting down waiting for a his hamburger order at 3am. He actually stopped, put his coffee and pen down, and spent a solid minute smiling and just taking in a picture of my wife, from behind, sitting a fifty or so feet away on a beach staring out into the water in the low-left corner of the frame with a low-flying plane the same size as her in top right of the frame. The shot really does viscerally convey groundedness, and airiness, the simultaneous distance and closeness of the juxtaposition on the infinite expanse of ocean and sky... it’s a great, kinda grainy, totally unpolished iPhone photograph.
Without a single pencil portrait or oil painting, he waived my admission and let me in on the spot. My school is no RISD, but a professor who went to RISD prided himself on perfect pencil realism as a high school student, but soon realized how little it mattered in practice. We obviously must know how to produce things visually, but perfectly reproducing a glass sphere sitting in front of a waterfall is a parlor trick. The time spent honing those skills to that level would be much better spend figuring out new and interesting ways to present what you see, or figuring out new angles or new truths to communicate about YOUR world, or even going out and experiencing new things to find captivating about it— many of them you'll probably find on your block.
Many folks— largely folks that haven’t ever or recently had anything to do with formal art education— think we lost something important by deemphasizing those rigid classical technical capabilities. Many of those folks would also be pretty sad if rock, rap, folk, cool jazz, folk, electronica, or any other modern music was replaced by Serious Classical Virtuosity.
In the end, you need exactly as much skill as you need to express what you want to express. The tools or techniques compensating for ‘missing’ skills often become the most compelling elements— like Jan van Eyck, here. He could have gotten a future iPad beamed to him with Adobe Illustrator installed on it and it wouldn’t make those prayer beads (or any of the other captivating shinies in his work) any less stunning. You can instantly tell his work by looking at it and it’s certainly not because everything looks just like a photograph— it has real emotional impact. It really viscerally communicates that weird Van Eck something and it definitely would do a worse job of it had he not used whatever projection doodad he used to get it.
More likely, Van Eyck spent days looking at a whole bunch of different kinds of glass and studying how light refracts through them, over the course of his art training. By the time he painted this piece he was somewhere between 44 and 54.
The detailed fur on the dog also probably owes a lot to that long training. He would have known how to quickly and efficiently use the brushes he had available to lay in multiple strands of fur at once. Possibly he also loaded the brush with multiple colors so that it changed over the course of one stroke, then went back with a fine brush to tweak some highlights. Or scraped off some of the paint after doing a simple, fat stroke.
Which, I suppose, relates to some of the things discussed later in this rambling post, where the creation of an imaginary simple drawing app leads to the idea of functions: a way to encapsulate something complex into a simpler thing that's easy to use.
I was told at some point that tree trunks are brown. If you have a coloring book and you see a tree, you color the trunk brown. The next time you have time, look at a tree trunk. You may see some brown, but you'll see a lot of other colors too.
Look at the sky on a very bright, cloudless day. Look straight up. Look towards the horizon. Look at how the color changes. Watch a whole sunset (don't look directly at the sun for prolonged periods). Watch how the color of the sky changes in every direction. Look for the rainbow in the sunset.
This is supported by this lovely paper looking at the difference between how artists look at images and how non-artists look at the same image:
Mao D, Kakarala R, Rajan D, Castleman SL. Understanding Photographic Composition through Data-driven Approaches. InVISAPP (2) 2010 (pp. 425-430).
https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2010/28421/28421.pdf
(Of course they used an eye tracker)
In brief... non-artists dwell on regions of obvious interest (faces, bodies etc), whilst the way artists look is more wide-ranging. They may find a lamppost behind the human subject as interesting at the human.
They're a bit unusual. They must exist in urban areas, but their form doesn't really matter as long as they can provide light.
Sure, highways and parking lots have cookie-cutter mini stadium lights. Sidewalk/street lights can vary a lot based on locality, though. My favorites are the variations on spherical lamps with domed tops. Overdone ironwork is a close second.
The tools used to obtain photo-realistic paintings, even in the 17th century, might contradict some of the more romantic notions of observation and beauty that we typically associate with art.
I'm willing to bet that dog looks way more interesting in the painting than it did in real life. I've never seen a real dog that looked like a wookie about town.
Nice touch: title tooltip for its closeup is "The doggo"
Cheers on the nice touch :) -- My friends at onegraph wrote the blog engine; they added a trick to markdown image tags, so I could set subtitles. Looks like they did the right thing with the alt text : )
None of the rectifications are "remarkably correct" in my opinion. As in, they don't result in an image that looks completely undistributed. Most easily seen at the table end in the mirror. The horizontally drawn line of the table end is clearly wrong. It would only be correct if it were at the center-line of the mirror, but it's well below.
But being 100% mathematically isn't really important for the painting I would argue. It captures the effect of the mirror as it "appears to the observer" perfectly in my opinion.
Agree that being 100% correct isn't important; this is addressed as the essays ambles on.
You made this essay better! _sends high five_
Also why aren't there any analogies between programmers and plumbers. Or programmers and a fast food joint. Why does it always have to be like architecture or master artists?
Learning programming is like becoming a grand master artist. You can learn both in a 6 month intensive boot camp.
Van Eyck is an absolute genius of an artist whether he is validated by some billionaire tech moghul or not. Do not destroy the beauty of the art with logic and technological aggression.
And he has to do two transformations. He has to do inversion and apply some spherical transformation. The inversion itself already had to make a bunch of assumptions. It's just a bad analysis for the sake of pretensioceness.
The only reason it's classified as "infrastructure" is that programmers are letting themselves be exploited.
Open-source is the key, "source available" is the path.
Am I the ony one that tried http://pixel.fyi?
Perhaps, but the two figures in the foreground don't look like real people. If realism is the goal, he should have spent more time there.
Except for the part about variables being invented in the 15th century which I don’t think is right.
^ I think this was the gentleman who introduced the idea of letters as parameters in equations
>the prayer beads seem uncannily real [...] Van Eyck must have spent days to stare at them (shortened)
Of course not. By the time he painted that, he was an accomplished painter. Therefore, he knew already (formally or not) to look at specular highlights, reflected lights, how the shadow works, etc. At some point, you could reduce all of the observation to light interacting with material. But like you do with math, you have a reduced number of special cases for which you can remember the result without deriving each individual steps.
>It’s longer than a normal human neck!
It's a kind of weird fetishization of "master artists". Any mistake they can make is an incredible deliberate choice. The people who say that generally would not be able to distinguish a 'master painting' from other paintings from the same era by 'minor artists'. They can only everything through the prism of what their art history book tell them they should think. Why is the perspective wrong on the scallop shell, what is the statement for the sea looking like a wallpaper? Did Botticelli never see the sea before painting it?
Then going to Van Gogh. There is no consistent theory that makes a Boticelli "good" and both Van Gogh paintings "good". They obey entirely different concepts of what "art" is supposed to be.
The part about explaining how to build up concepts in programming seems way more interesting, but it seems to me that it would be much be without the analogy with art that is built upon layers of misunderstanding. To me this is exactly the kind of mental burden that I had to painfully unlearn before I could start improving in the ways of art, and reconstruct a mental model of how things actually work.
This slobbering gush of praise may be right or it may not, but I feel I'm being battered into agreeing.
Light strikes objects in a scene; generally speaking, at each illuminated point reflected light radiates away in all directions, a sphere (subject to caveats: occlusion, unequal strength in all directions). Rays from each point reach the viewer's eyes, where the lenses of the eye project the image onto the retina. This image is then interpreted by the brain.
To create an image, you are doing one of two things: either you take this three-dimensional scene, project it onto an imaginary two-dimensional plane in front of the viewer, and render a (generally planar) artifact which reflects similar colors and light -- that is, your painting. (You will be subject to various challenges, like mismatched lighting that reflects from that painting, materials limitations, resolution limitations.)
OR...
Reverse-engineer the brain itself, such that it perceives things in a similar way, despite a difference in the actual rendered image.
> Van Eyck must have spent days
I am curious, from your experience, how long do you think it would have taken Van Eyck to get the prayer beads this right?
> It’s longer than a normal human neck
I agree with you that people fetishize master artists. Yet, I think you must also agree that painters often alter reality to achieve an effect. I chose to use the neck as an example, for it's much more likely that he did on this purpose, and it really hit me as a surprise when I first looked at that painting.
> There is no consistent theory that makes a Botticelli "good" and both Van Gogh paintings "good".
The theory I proposed is "what affects humans". This is much fuzzier than mathematical theory, but I think you can judge both works as good, if they affect humans as the artists intended.
--
If you have suggestions for books that explore painting, less from an art history perspective, and more from a painter's perspective, would love em!
Not the parent poster, but: check out some YouTube videos on realistic painting. A professional artist would probably get them to 90% finished in like an hour or so with some fine tuning later.
It doesn’t have to be perfect raycasting, it just has to be convincing/good enough.
A Chinese painter I know says his master spent one month in the mountain studying monkeys, and after that he only needed a glimpse to capture the image of one in full details. I think what matters here is that with time, your brain learns to reduce the complexity of the domain. In doing so you just have to remember a few key points (skull shape, expression, ...) that will capture the whole, most of "a monkey" being similar to another monkey, so you can reconstruct the missing pieces. Of course, a monkey is a tremendously complicated object compared to a set of glass beads, since there are many more dimensions (hairy, young, fur color, ...).
For mistakes of breaking the rules, I agree that it might have been intentional. Maybe he just made a gesture, found it to be good, and disregarded the anatomical accuracy. I was not intimate with him, so I wouldn't know. Many famous examples were not accepted as such a famous critic of the "Grande Odalisque" claimed she had three additional vertebrae compared to a normal human. Who has the best sensibility, the one who admires the painting nonetheless, or the one who sees a deformed human?
I don't know "what affects humans", or how that could separate "art" from "anything else". It did not affect contemporaries of Van Gogh, and most people who are affected by it are so after having been immersed in a culture claiming it is high-art, or facing ridicule as uneducated rubes. I believe most of the time this actually means "has some market value".
For a reference from a painter's perspective, James Gurney's "Color and light - a guide for the realist painter" is probably the current standard.
> It did not affect contemporaries of Van Gogh, and most people who are affected by it are so after having been immersed in a culture claiming it is high-art, or facing ridicule as uneducated rubes. I believe most of the time this actually means "has some market value".
I agree that there's a lot of strutting in art, but I think this is too cynical of an assessment. This kind of argument can be made for books, obtuse mathematical works (Principia Mathematica, 1980s AI, etc), and the new programming paradigm du jour. Eventually critics and contemporaries die, and time begins to tell what was truly exceptional and what wasn't. I would bet Van Gogh falls into the great camp; but we'll see for sure in a few more centuries.
I spoke with a conservator at the gallery. He says that indeed the beads likely didn't take too long to put to the canvas. Hey may have looked at them a while, but at least the process of transferring them to the canvas was quick.
I've edited this section. You have made the essay stronger. Thank you!
yeah really, my experience as an artist[1] is about 50% "I am gonna deliberately draw this lady with exaggerated proportions" and about 50% more like "aww shit I got really into some parts of this piece and only just now realized how much I fucked up these underlying proportions, and I really like some of the bits I already did too much to throw it away, how can I make it work".
Digital tools make it easier to deal with the second case, "lemme just grab this head and move it down a bit" is infinitely easier in Photoshop than on canvas.
1: I've paid my bills with art since ~2000, and I've worked under people who were definitely masters of their craft, and I have seen the exact same "shit I fucked this up how can I make this work, okay this looks kinda cool now and it reads as a stylistic decision instead of a mistake" behavior in their drawings.