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What Artists Notice

166 points by stopachka 5y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Daub 4y ago
The article seems to be claiming that artists are different for the attention they give to detail. True enough I guess. The way humans look at the world is perceptual, whilst artists (a sub-class of human) tend to employ a more optical approach. 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 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.
- dictateawayyyee 4y ago
  To be fair, lampposts are extremely interesting. 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.
jancsika 4y ago
> And even the dog is gifted with attention; look at its fur! 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"
- stopachka 4y ago
  I give you that, I doubt the dog was as debonair. 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 : )
wiradikusuma 4y ago
I observe something similar in some (not all) games, especially those that took years in the making. The level of attention is mind-blowing.
choxi 4y ago
I used to think the cliche of the “sensitive artist” meant that artists were more emotional or dramatic. I see it now as they’re literally more sensitive, as in the mental experience of their senses is higher resolution or prone to intense focus. I wonder how much of genius or talent is a sort of trained sensitivity.
caseyross 4y ago
I think for people like us engineers who don't spend a lot of time developing our "visual sense", it can be hard to understand what the big deal is about painting and other visual arts. 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!
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Be very careful. Digital cameras have a lot of noise that has nothing to do with the actual reality. Using that as your barometer is likely to mislead unless you’ve got a very good camera (or just use a microscope).
  - unfocussed_mike 4y ago
    And they are not good at certain kinds of colour subtlety -- even the Foveon sensors struggle with the colours of dim, diffuse light (sunsets etc.) and deep muted colours (the grey-green of ivy leaves for example).
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    Yep. I was an artist before I became a programmer, and one thing we were taught is that we have to learn to draw/paint from direct observation rather than from photographs. Cameras reduce so much from the real world.
- zamfi 4y ago
sarupbanskota 4y ago
Reminds me of https://littlebigdetails.com/ https://littlebigdetails.com/
egypturnash 4y ago
A practiced meditator would find it hard to stare at prayer beads for more than a few hours, while Van Eyck must have spent days. 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.
stuntkite 4y ago
I really love how this article was written. I am unfamiliar with the author and I went in expecting something short but cool about how weird it is to layer paint on a canvas to assemble a perpetual light field that other humans can look at but the hard left turn that is really just straight down the road into programming and math. Even the presentation of the blog and how the story is chunked out. This is really exemplary and beautiful stuff and inspires me to put my ideas together in ways that can deliver similar relevance, ideas, and charm for the reader. 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.
- stopachka 4y ago
  This brightened my day to read. Thank you.
  - stuntkite 4y ago
    No, thank you! This is quite the gift you've given me and I look forward to learning more about what you're doing!
gumby 4y ago
As a programmer who married a painter this resonated with me. Except for the part about variables being invented in the 15th century which I don’t think is right.
- stopachka 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Vi%C3%A8te https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Vi%C3%A8te ^ I think this was the gentleman who introduced the idea of letters as parameters in equations
  - gumby 4y ago
    Diophantos’s notation had variables over 2000 years ago, and letter were used in Indian algebra over a thousand years ago.
johnqian 4y ago
This appraisal of Van Eyck's painting strikes me as odd. If my mission was to paint a room as photorealistically as possible, I would certainly notice all the differences between my painting and reality, I think anyone would. What differentiates a great painter, I think, is not whether they _notice_ the details, but whether they have the skill and care to actually reproduce them all. But maybe I'm wrong? Do people here feel like they wouldn't realize why their dog fur didn't look realistic, even if they had a real dog right in front of them? 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.
- cjsawyer 4y ago
  I think that there’s a difference between just seeing something and taking it in deeply enough to carry the information into their minds eye and then transfer that onto a canvas through finger movements. I’m absolutely no expert here but it seems like the physical reproduction step (moving paint around) is secondary to the skills involved with the first step, even if that’s what people equate to being an artist.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Uncanny valley is a context problem. Weird-looking teeth aren't just a trivial detail, they ruin the credibility of the whole. 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.
DavidPiper 4y ago
The start of the article reminded me of the movie Tim's Vermeer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer), which I highly recommend. 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.
csours 4y ago
Here's a couple to think about: 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.
achille 4y ago
The author claims that Van Eyck notices details we'd otherwise miss out and uses the Arnolfini portrait as supporting evidence. However it's possible that artifacts such as the beads appear not because he saw the world differently, but due to his artistic choice of tools. He may have used an optical projection device, a "perspective machine" -- Which means that his process may not have allowed for skipping the inclusion of the beads. See: - https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-optical-device-jan-van-eyck-may-have-used-to-paint-his-masterpieces-new-research-166671 https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-optical-device-ja... - https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-03287031/file/VanEyckPerspectivalSystem%2BSM.pdf https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-03287031/file/VanEyckPerspe... - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-31903-2_11 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-31903-2_...
- shahar2k 4y ago
  hoestly that's an real disservice to how hard it would be even to paint something from a projected image, this is the same kind of reductive judgement digital artists get today about making their art, I'd challenge anyone to try and take a camera obscura make a painting that looks as good as that one without the vast experience and training behind even simple things like handling and mixing pigments and filling in details that have moved. 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.
  - achille 4y ago
    Absolutely agree that this is an incredibly hard skill in any medium, digital or otherwise. 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.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  Of course, as far as artistry goes, it really doesn’t matter. 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.
Bigpet 4y ago
I'm a little confused about the comment about the mirror rectifications. The author seems to claim that the other versions in the paper are "mathematically correct versions". But the label says that those are rectifications applied to the image with different assumptions about the mirror shape. 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.
- stopachka 4y ago
  Thanks for this comment! I rushed a bit with the diagram. In the paper there's another diagram where they try produce a "corrected" version of the mirror. I went ahead and replaced it. Agree that being 100% correct isn't important; this is addressed as the essays ambles on. You made this essay better! _sends high five_
amznbyebyebye 4y ago
I was so turned off and offended when I saw PG mentioned in what looked like a lovely appreciation of Van Eyck. 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.
psyc 4y ago
I don't have much to add except this article is amazing. As an aspiring painter, I used to stare at parts of paintings without moving, for an hour, until I decided I'd learned all I could from staring at that part of the painting and noticing everything I could find to notice. Later as a computer graphicist I did the same, except staring at real life, and for longer periods of time.
- stopachka 4y ago
  Brought a smile to read this. Thank you
dschuetz 4y ago
By "artists" the article means painters, and then they compare programmers to artists (again: painters). I'm a painter, an artist generally, and I do program a bit. Neither of those things are the comparable. Each requires a completely different perspective and state of mind. This is where the attention to details comes from: working on details.
woolion 4y ago
I think it's the kind of essays that are in the "not even wrong realm", that yet manages to pull anyone reading this in the wrong direction. I'm not an artist even though I spend quite some time painting, so that may be the reason for my difference of interpretation. >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.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  Thanks for the dissection, I really agree there's far too much uncritical adulation of 'art' - "famous person did this so it's very good, and don't contradict". I think art is a personal thing, a matter of taste, yet somehow you're not allowed to judge against. This slobbering gush of praise may be right or it may not, but I feel I'm being battered into agreeing.
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  > 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. 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.
amelius 4y ago
> Look at the prayer beads beside the mirror: (...) Don’t they seem uncannily real? 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.
bullen 4y ago
Programming is the final art. 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 http://pixel.fyi?
deltaonefour 4y ago
The mirror thing smells like bs. How the hell can he calculate what the mathematical curvatures should be without the actual flat reflection? He only has the possibly mathematically incorrect original reflection and has to do transformations from there. 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.
deltaonefour 4y ago
Why do programmers always like to make analogies. It's like every programmer blog post is some kind of analogy. What is it with programmers and analogies. 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.
uwagar 4y ago
and then talks about ... programmers!

166 points by stopachka 5y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Daub 4y ago

The article seems to be claiming that artists are different for the attention they give to detail. True enough I guess. The way humans look at the world is perceptual, whilst artists (a sub-class of human) tend to employ a more optical approach. 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 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.

dictateawayyyee 4y ago
To be fair, lampposts are extremely interesting. 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.

jancsika 4y ago

> And even the dog is gifted with attention; look at its fur! 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"

stopachka 4y ago
I give you that, I doubt the dog was as debonair. 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 : )

wiradikusuma 4y ago

I observe something similar in some (not all) games, especially those that took years in the making. The level of attention is mind-blowing.

choxi 4y ago

I used to think the cliche of the “sensitive artist” meant that artists were more emotional or dramatic. I see it now as they’re literally more sensitive, as in the mental experience of their senses is higher resolution or prone to intense focus. I wonder how much of genius or talent is a sort of trained sensitivity.

caseyross 4y ago

I think for people like us engineers who don't spend a lot of time developing our "visual sense", it can be hard to understand what the big deal is about painting and other visual arts. 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!

vlovich123 4y ago
Be very careful. Digital cameras have a lot of noise that has nothing to do with the actual reality. Using that as your barometer is likely to mislead unless you’ve got a very good camera (or just use a microscope).
- unfocussed_mike 4y ago
  And they are not good at certain kinds of colour subtlety -- even the Foveon sensors struggle with the colours of dim, diffuse light (sunsets etc.) and deep muted colours (the grey-green of ivy leaves for example).
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Yep. I was an artist before I became a programmer, and one thing we were taught is that we have to learn to draw/paint from direct observation rather than from photographs. Cameras reduce so much from the real world.
zamfi 4y ago

sarupbanskota 4y ago

Reminds me of https://littlebigdetails.com/ https://littlebigdetails.com/

egypturnash 4y ago

A practiced meditator would find it hard to stare at prayer beads for more than a few hours, while Van Eyck must have spent days. 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.

stuntkite 4y ago

I really love how this article was written. I am unfamiliar with the author and I went in expecting something short but cool about how weird it is to layer paint on a canvas to assemble a perpetual light field that other humans can look at but the hard left turn that is really just straight down the road into programming and math. Even the presentation of the blog and how the story is chunked out. This is really exemplary and beautiful stuff and inspires me to put my ideas together in ways that can deliver similar relevance, ideas, and charm for the reader. 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.

stopachka 4y ago
This brightened my day to read. Thank you.
- stuntkite 4y ago
  No, thank you! This is quite the gift you've given me and I look forward to learning more about what you're doing!

gumby 4y ago

As a programmer who married a painter this resonated with me. Except for the part about variables being invented in the 15th century which I don’t think is right.

stopachka 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Vi%C3%A8te https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Vi%C3%A8te ^ I think this was the gentleman who introduced the idea of letters as parameters in equations
- gumby 4y ago
  Diophantos’s notation had variables over 2000 years ago, and letter were used in Indian algebra over a thousand years ago.

johnqian 4y ago

This appraisal of Van Eyck's painting strikes me as odd. If my mission was to paint a room as photorealistically as possible, I would certainly notice all the differences between my painting and reality, I think anyone would. What differentiates a great painter, I think, is not whether they _notice_ the details, but whether they have the skill and care to actually reproduce them all. But maybe I'm wrong? Do people here feel like they wouldn't realize why their dog fur didn't look realistic, even if they had a real dog right in front of them? 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.

cjsawyer 4y ago
I think that there’s a difference between just seeing something and taking it in deeply enough to carry the information into their minds eye and then transfer that onto a canvas through finger movements. I’m absolutely no expert here but it seems like the physical reproduction step (moving paint around) is secondary to the skills involved with the first step, even if that’s what people equate to being an artist.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Uncanny valley is a context problem. Weird-looking teeth aren't just a trivial detail, they ruin the credibility of the whole. 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.

DavidPiper 4y ago

The start of the article reminded me of the movie Tim's Vermeer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer), which I highly recommend. 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.

csours 4y ago

Here's a couple to think about: 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.

achille 4y ago

The author claims that Van Eyck notices details we'd otherwise miss out and uses the Arnolfini portrait as supporting evidence. However it's possible that artifacts such as the beads appear not because he saw the world differently, but due to his artistic choice of tools. He may have used an optical projection device, a "perspective machine" -- Which means that his process may not have allowed for skipping the inclusion of the beads. See: - https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-optical-device-jan-van-eyck-may-have-used-to-paint-his-masterpieces-new-research-166671 https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-optical-device-ja... - https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-03287031/file/VanEyckPerspectivalSystem%2BSM.pdf https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-03287031/file/VanEyckPerspe... - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-31903-2_11 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-31903-2_...

shahar2k 4y ago
hoestly that's an real disservice to how hard it would be even to paint something from a projected image, this is the same kind of reductive judgement digital artists get today about making their art, I'd challenge anyone to try and take a camera obscura make a painting that looks as good as that one without the vast experience and training behind even simple things like handling and mixing pigments and filling in details that have moved. 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.
- achille 4y ago
  Absolutely agree that this is an incredibly hard skill in any medium, digital or otherwise. 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.
ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
Of course, as far as artistry goes, it really doesn’t matter. 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.

Bigpet 4y ago

I'm a little confused about the comment about the mirror rectifications. The author seems to claim that the other versions in the paper are "mathematically correct versions". But the label says that those are rectifications applied to the image with different assumptions about the mirror shape. 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.

stopachka 4y ago
Thanks for this comment! I rushed a bit with the diagram. In the paper there's another diagram where they try produce a "corrected" version of the mirror. I went ahead and replaced it. Agree that being 100% correct isn't important; this is addressed as the essays ambles on. You made this essay better! _sends high five_

amznbyebyebye 4y ago

I was so turned off and offended when I saw PG mentioned in what looked like a lovely appreciation of Van Eyck. 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.

psyc 4y ago

I don't have much to add except this article is amazing. As an aspiring painter, I used to stare at parts of paintings without moving, for an hour, until I decided I'd learned all I could from staring at that part of the painting and noticing everything I could find to notice. Later as a computer graphicist I did the same, except staring at real life, and for longer periods of time.

stopachka 4y ago
Brought a smile to read this. Thank you

dschuetz 4y ago

By "artists" the article means painters, and then they compare programmers to artists (again: painters). I'm a painter, an artist generally, and I do program a bit. Neither of those things are the comparable. Each requires a completely different perspective and state of mind. This is where the attention to details comes from: working on details.

woolion 4y ago

I think it's the kind of essays that are in the "not even wrong realm", that yet manages to pull anyone reading this in the wrong direction. I'm not an artist even though I spend quite some time painting, so that may be the reason for my difference of interpretation. >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.

zasdffaa 4y ago
Thanks for the dissection, I really agree there's far too much uncritical adulation of 'art' - "famous person did this so it's very good, and don't contradict". I think art is a personal thing, a matter of taste, yet somehow you're not allowed to judge against. This slobbering gush of praise may be right or it may not, but I feel I'm being battered into agreeing.
fennecfoxen 4y ago
> 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. 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.

amelius 4y ago

> Look at the prayer beads beside the mirror: (...) Don’t they seem uncannily real? 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.

bullen 4y ago

Programming is the final art. 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 http://pixel.fyi?

deltaonefour 4y ago

The mirror thing smells like bs. How the hell can he calculate what the mathematical curvatures should be without the actual flat reflection? He only has the possibly mathematically incorrect original reflection and has to do transformations from there. 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.

deltaonefour 4y ago

Why do programmers always like to make analogies. It's like every programmer blog post is some kind of analogy. What is it with programmers and analogies. 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.

uwagar 4y ago

and then talks about ... programmers!