5 ms·

Gustav Klimt's Obsession with Gold

107 points by pseudolus 2y ago

Daub 2y ago
I teach digital painting. You would be surprised how many students ask how to achieve ‘the color gold’. One of the qualifiers of physical paint (as opposed to digital paint) is, not surprisingly, its materiality. Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride. I have to remind myself that for some of them the very first experience of painting was on an iPad. Of TFA, it is no surprise that he was greatly influenced by Byzantine mosaics. Both are supremely decorative, flat and strongly symmetrical.
- Filligree 2y ago
  Well, hold on. Gold is a specific color, specularity and emissiveness. I wouldn’t expect to achieve it in a 2D drawing program, and I’m not sure what fraction of monitors can achieve it at all, but it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine.
  - Daub 2y ago
    In addition to teaching digital painting I also teach 3d. What you describe is completely correct and something I would emulate using Blenders BSDF shader. This would emulate real world materiality, but my point is that color is the lest of the key properties of a metal. For the most part, the Colour would derive from environment reflections, which would all be tinted with ‘gold color’.
  - reaperman 2y ago
    > it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine The color of physical metallic gold is outside of sRGB color space. Maybe you could get close enough to fool people with some of the best modern HDR's (I don't know), but for most of the history of modern computing it didn't matter how good you were at digital animation -- no display could display the color "gold" even if you could mathematically compute the right color.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      It's just orange, reflective orange. The italics part is the rest of the owl.
    - beeflet 2y ago
      I'm not an expert on color profiles and HDR stuff but it seems like the kind of thing that's possible with PBR and the right color profiling, which isnt too modern. I'm sure that there are some colors in the human-visible range that aren't covered by sRGB but idk if gold is one of them
    - cvz 2y ago
      sRGB is a red herring here. There are colors outside the sRGB gamut, but those colors are all very saturated. "Gold", including the color of the actual metal, isn't saturated enough to be among them. The real problem is that gold is a mirror. It's shiny and changes appearance based on viewing angle and environment. A computer can only simulate that for the scene within the computer. It can't make the image itself more or less shiny than the physical monitor. Without the shininess, gold just looks like a dirty yellow.
  - m463 2y ago
    I wonder about things that can't be portrayed by our digital devices. Another one is the "speckles" you see when illuminating a surface with a laser.
- jessekv 2y ago
  I've been learning digital painting. Getting realistic materials is tricky indeed! So far, I've struggled with liquids, metals, glass, and the hardest of all: rocks. It's really hard to get the texture and shadow to feel natural! I'd be thrilled to get a few tips here...
  - Daub 2y ago
    Top tips…. Using a digital brush on its own can be extremely limiting. Digital paint is inherently flat and lifeless. Textured brushes can help, but not much. I would recommend employing natural textures via blend modes. The best blend mode for passing textures from one image to another is overlay. In this way the texture of a photo of a rusty surface may be passed onto a painting of a rock. Essentially painting with textures... or photo-bashing. Here is a walk through I did for my students… https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/photoshop-painting-approach-compositing-painting?module_item_id=4073985 https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/photoshop-p... Happy to answer any questions.
- krisoft 2y ago
  > Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to introduce them to drawing from observation? They don't have to understand what "materiality" is, just see that the object appears different depending on how they hold it, where the lights are and what else is around it. (Assuming that you don't have a bar of gold hanging out in your class you could grab some toy gold coins.)
- twic 2y ago
  Skill issue, Warhammer painters are all over it: http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-metals.html http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...
  - Modified3019 2y ago
    What the fuck are you doing with that link? Here’s the link without the bullshit: http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-metals.html http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...
    - twic 2y ago
      Oh, sorry. I'm at work, and my company uses some dogshit safe browsing wrapper service. Sometimes i forget to trim the prefix off before posting a link. Fixed now, thanks for pointing it out.
axegon_ 2y ago
As the son of two artists, both of whom never liked gold, Klimt is a strange breed: My parents have made a ton of murals, jam-packed with gold. Not because they wanted but because rich people(the type of people who want murals in their homes and can afford it) love it as an expression of their financial status. Both of them hated much of those murals and I can only name a handful of works they truly liked, at the end of the day, the customer is always right. And having seen much of their work(and taking some part on a few occasions circumstantially since I can't draw a single line to save my life), I completely agree with them. We have a word which roughly translates to mobbaroque in English. In almost all cases, this is exactly what it is. Having said that, my mom specifically has a few favorite artists, Klimt being one of them. Over the years she's been asked to make dozens of Klimt replicas(The Kiss probably accounting for 80% of them) and she's loved doing all of them. I think Klimt is the only artist to successfully incorporate gold into his paintings without making them look obnoxious or ostentatious. Not only that but made them look incredible. Admittedly I never looked all that deep as to why he was "obsessed" with it.
- ewuhic 2y ago
  What would be the original "mobbaroque" word your parents use?
  - axegon_ 2y ago
    They don't use it exclusively(they didn't come up with it), it's a pretty common word across the country. So much so, that even google has picked up on it a lil bit: https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BC%D1%83%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BA&udm=2&biw=1920&bih=999&dpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BC%D1%83%D1%82%D1%80%D0%...
- Daub 2y ago
  You may appreciate the following anecdote about Picasso. He was offered a lot of money to make a sculpture entirely in hold. His response was ‘Great! I will paint it black!’.
  - 2y ago
amarcheschi 2y ago
Ironically enough, when I visited the neue galerie in New York (which hosts a small selection of klimt's paintings, including the expensive Adele bloch Bauer), the painting that impressed me the most was the most white and plain. The portrait of Gertrude Loew really shook me. Photos don't do it justice. I was hypnotized, it was such a strange feeling
dukeofdoom 2y ago
It adds something sparkly reminiscent of life giving sun. Just some moderation like jewelry.. too much and it's monkey puke
anigbrowl 2y ago
Let me save you a click: Goldsmithing Was the Klimt Family Business This is TMZ-level art journalism.
SamBam 2y ago
Klimt is one of those artists that I feel primed to dislike, because it's so reproduced that's it's turned cheesy. I've probably seen more Kiss posters and fridge magnets and whatevers than any other painting in the world. But good god are they beautiful. They just make me so happy to see them. Or sad. My favorites are probably the birch forests, though, perhaps Birch Forest (1903) [1] 1. https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/farmhouse-with-birch-trees-1903 https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/farmhouse-with-birch...

107 points by pseudolus 2y ago

Daub 2y ago

I teach digital painting. You would be surprised how many students ask how to achieve ‘the color gold’. One of the qualifiers of physical paint (as opposed to digital paint) is, not surprisingly, its materiality. Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride. I have to remind myself that for some of them the very first experience of painting was on an iPad. Of TFA, it is no surprise that he was greatly influenced by Byzantine mosaics. Both are supremely decorative, flat and strongly symmetrical.

Filligree 2y ago
Well, hold on. Gold is a specific color, specularity and emissiveness. I wouldn’t expect to achieve it in a 2D drawing program, and I’m not sure what fraction of monitors can achieve it at all, but it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine.
- Daub 2y ago
  In addition to teaching digital painting I also teach 3d. What you describe is completely correct and something I would emulate using Blenders BSDF shader. This would emulate real world materiality, but my point is that color is the lest of the key properties of a metal. For the most part, the Colour would derive from environment reflections, which would all be tinted with ‘gold color’.
- reaperman 2y ago
  > it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine The color of physical metallic gold is outside of sRGB color space. Maybe you could get close enough to fool people with some of the best modern HDR's (I don't know), but for most of the history of modern computing it didn't matter how good you were at digital animation -- no display could display the color "gold" even if you could mathematically compute the right color.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    It's just orange, reflective orange. The italics part is the rest of the owl.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    I'm not an expert on color profiles and HDR stuff but it seems like the kind of thing that's possible with PBR and the right color profiling, which isnt too modern. I'm sure that there are some colors in the human-visible range that aren't covered by sRGB but idk if gold is one of them
  - cvz 2y ago
    sRGB is a red herring here. There are colors outside the sRGB gamut, but those colors are all very saturated. "Gold", including the color of the actual metal, isn't saturated enough to be among them. The real problem is that gold is a mirror. It's shiny and changes appearance based on viewing angle and environment. A computer can only simulate that for the scene within the computer. It can't make the image itself more or less shiny than the physical monitor. Without the shininess, gold just looks like a dirty yellow.
- m463 2y ago
  I wonder about things that can't be portrayed by our digital devices. Another one is the "speckles" you see when illuminating a surface with a laser.
jessekv 2y ago
I've been learning digital painting. Getting realistic materials is tricky indeed! So far, I've struggled with liquids, metals, glass, and the hardest of all: rocks. It's really hard to get the texture and shadow to feel natural! I'd be thrilled to get a few tips here...
- Daub 2y ago
  Top tips…. Using a digital brush on its own can be extremely limiting. Digital paint is inherently flat and lifeless. Textured brushes can help, but not much. I would recommend employing natural textures via blend modes. The best blend mode for passing textures from one image to another is overlay. In this way the texture of a photo of a rusty surface may be passed onto a painting of a rock. Essentially painting with textures... or photo-bashing. Here is a walk through I did for my students… https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/photoshop-painting-approach-compositing-painting?module_item_id=4073985 https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/photoshop-p... Happy to answer any questions.
krisoft 2y ago
> Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to introduce them to drawing from observation? They don't have to understand what "materiality" is, just see that the object appears different depending on how they hold it, where the lights are and what else is around it. (Assuming that you don't have a bar of gold hanging out in your class you could grab some toy gold coins.)
twic 2y ago
Skill issue, Warhammer painters are all over it: http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-metals.html http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...
- Modified3019 2y ago
  What the fuck are you doing with that link? Here’s the link without the bullshit: http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-metals.html http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...
  - twic 2y ago
    Oh, sorry. I'm at work, and my company uses some dogshit safe browsing wrapper service. Sometimes i forget to trim the prefix off before posting a link. Fixed now, thanks for pointing it out.

axegon_ 2y ago

As the son of two artists, both of whom never liked gold, Klimt is a strange breed: My parents have made a ton of murals, jam-packed with gold. Not because they wanted but because rich people(the type of people who want murals in their homes and can afford it) love it as an expression of their financial status. Both of them hated much of those murals and I can only name a handful of works they truly liked, at the end of the day, the customer is always right. And having seen much of their work(and taking some part on a few occasions circumstantially since I can't draw a single line to save my life), I completely agree with them. We have a word which roughly translates to mobbaroque in English. In almost all cases, this is exactly what it is. Having said that, my mom specifically has a few favorite artists, Klimt being one of them. Over the years she's been asked to make dozens of Klimt replicas(The Kiss probably accounting for 80% of them) and she's loved doing all of them. I think Klimt is the only artist to successfully incorporate gold into his paintings without making them look obnoxious or ostentatious. Not only that but made them look incredible. Admittedly I never looked all that deep as to why he was "obsessed" with it.

ewuhic 2y ago
What would be the original "mobbaroque" word your parents use?
- axegon_ 2y ago
  They don't use it exclusively(they didn't come up with it), it's a pretty common word across the country. So much so, that even google has picked up on it a lil bit: https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BC%D1%83%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BA&udm=2&biw=1920&bih=999&dpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BC%D1%83%D1%82%D1%80%D0%...
Daub 2y ago
You may appreciate the following anecdote about Picasso. He was offered a lot of money to make a sculpture entirely in hold. His response was ‘Great! I will paint it black!’.
- 2y ago

amarcheschi 2y ago

Ironically enough, when I visited the neue galerie in New York (which hosts a small selection of klimt's paintings, including the expensive Adele bloch Bauer), the painting that impressed me the most was the most white and plain. The portrait of Gertrude Loew really shook me. Photos don't do it justice. I was hypnotized, it was such a strange feeling

dukeofdoom 2y ago

It adds something sparkly reminiscent of life giving sun. Just some moderation like jewelry.. too much and it's monkey puke

anigbrowl 2y ago

Let me save you a click: Goldsmithing Was the Klimt Family Business This is TMZ-level art journalism.

SamBam 2y ago

Klimt is one of those artists that I feel primed to dislike, because it's so reproduced that's it's turned cheesy. I've probably seen more Kiss posters and fridge magnets and whatevers than any other painting in the world. But good god are they beautiful. They just make me so happy to see them. Or sad. My favorites are probably the birch forests, though, perhaps Birch Forest (1903) [1] 1. https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/farmhouse-with-birch-trees-1903 https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/farmhouse-with-birch...