Painting by Van Dyck

I don’t actually remember the name of the museum where I saw this amazing, life changing shit. All German words are the same to me. But it was huge and disappointingly I had to run to Mitte and I couldn’t really take my time with these amazing paintings. The Flemish masters especially will have a huge impact on any set up shots that I do but the older religious works were also affective.

• Ghirlandio had backgrounds of his portraits as sharp as the foreground but by controlling the relative sizes of the fore and background still made the head standout. Great portraits. I have to think about how I can do something similar. I think using photoshop to superimpose the face onto an empty shot of the background may be a very interesting idea.
• The paintings from the middle ages have great technique but what Gombrich says about the Egyptians and their lack of innovation over millennia applies here too. There is very little room of individual differences between the artists. But this was when art was for useful things beyond just aesthetics. When paintings were key ways to tell stories. So often the story triumphs over the aesthetics. Rightly so. Like typefaces are right now.
• Found the plethora of mid-shot portraits actually quite inspiring. It’s nice to have the hands in there and not just the faces. Most of the pictures do not question their subjects at all though and are just a form of hagiography. In modernity one can question the sitter much more, make them look silly, find a deeper self for them through the painting or the photo. Obvious.
• Some of the portraits look like they’ve been painted over another painting. The subject in the back seems to be of a different era (but what would I know), or the perspectives seem dramatically different. Strange.
• Realised that painters never blurred their background for portraits. The idea just didn’t exist. That’s an interesting problem. I guess as they developed they did use black backgrounds (one I saw used green and it looked good) to isolate the subject. But actually having a detailed background to the portraits would be something new and different in this day and age. But it is hard to get I think, I think the super imposition idea may work well. Or getting the D700 and using super high ISOs to get both person and background in focus. But there would be a lot of loss of dynamic range. Boo hoo.
• In very early Italian religious art no one looks at you directly in the portraits. Reminds me of the amazing, amazing Benjamin Rinner portraits that are all over Berlin at the moment. They are close in, black background portraits of people from the Berlin Philharmonic looking so naive that it is shocking. They are amazingly honest portraits and I want to do work similar to that if I can out in the outback with some reflectors instead of lights. Don’t know how to get the back background. Avedon has already done white.
• Klimt’s gold leafing isn’t new. Lots of dark ages paintings used it for the backgrounds to portray holiness. Klimt divorced it from that pretty strongly I guess to use it for more decorative reasons. Had an idea to gold leaf out parts of a photo (maybe the the house in a picture of a house just leaving the background).
• Another thing that made me think of Klimt was the way the dark age painters would mass people together to represent like a chorus. Reifying these people makes them represent a concept. I think Klimt was doing the same thing in his paintings, where life is a collection of people hugging each other. Snap!
• De Georgio Martini had a painting which had wonderfully strange architectural porportions. I think it was from the 16th century. Seemed modern in a way. The scene of a courtyard were scene are scene from the other side of some columns and a low wall. But the columns and low wall take up a lot of room. The wall take up a third of the painting from the bottom. The painting seems squeezed. Then there is a nearly empty courtyard where the tiles go straight up to the river where there are boats. It was nearly surrealist in it’s slight shifting of reality to hint at a dream.
• Seeing the distortion that was used in the past where less important people are dramatically smaller than large people would be a very interesting thing to try these days using photoshop.
• The patterns in the clothes are super modern and very very interesting. Nearly modernist patterns appear on a 14th century ladies. Some awesome sandals were being worn back then too.
• I liked the greys and browns of Lorenzetti.
• Massacchio’s long portraits are an interesting shape and the pictures look good tightly next to each other.
• Miniature portraits in lockets really reminded me of modern day wallet photos. Everything has a lineage. This also reminded me of the amount of photo booths all over Berlin. Such a throwback but people use them all the time when they are drunk.
• Raffael has awesome technique. But everything looks too beautiful? Too idealised?
• The dark portrait lighting is amazing. See Moroni. I may need to buy a light and a big light-box, I think that’s how you do it, with a counter-light on the other side or even a reflector to bounce the main light back. So much mystery is created in these paintings.
• Idea: go back to bangladesh with a dark shaded studio that you can set up on the streets and get people in for portraits.
• I’m so, so interested in portraits at the moment. I can see the history of portraits which go back so far and has had so many practitioners. We can now do extreme detail and of people from the east instead of just the west.
• Later (17th C?) the portraits start losing detail. Don’t like these as much.
• Saw an awesome circular bench downstairs. Could be good for parties to build circular or square benches in the backyard. But too confronting?
• Saw some still lifes of dead animals which was really interesting in light of my night meat photos from Bangladesh. Dead meat is interesting! Lighting is the key thing being explored I guess. I should have done more maybe.
• Love, love the ‘cleanliness’ of van Miereveld and the others. There is such precision of representation. It is an aesthetic fly trap. But although the window is so clear do we care about the subject of the paintings more? That purpose has been lost in the winds of time as these people posing have become insignificant.
• Later European portraits do not have the ‘bite’, the strength of purpose and emotional tautness of the old religious ones. There isn’t that attempt to deify, or to connect to connotations of the transcendental or mad religiosity.
• The floors in the museum was very loud. I took off my shoes and walked around the museum with them under my arm. I made a sculpture before entering the museum. A cubic block 5cm square that had come loose on the footpath. Took some sand and rested the cube on one of it’s corners standing up. Put this in the middle of the footpath with a line bisecting the hole where the cube came from.
• Some of the religious war pictures had a weird mix of bright colours in a heap on the painting. Could come to like them but would take effort. Don’t like them.
• Mellins use of uplighting from the left for the fat guy full length painting was interesting, and different to what any of the others were doing. Gave it a different emotion. I don’t know what that emotion was?
• Caravaggio is funny! He’s irreverent. This is especially so in contrast with all of the serious portraits and religious scenes and war scenes in the room with him. He is also amazingly skilled and observant. The creases on the stomach of the cherub knocking over musical instruments are lovely.
• Whilst I was looking at Caravaggio I had one of my regular urges to tell people what I was thinking and so I wasted my time saying something about Carvaggio to a British dick who didn’t think Caravaggio was humorous. The dick was maybe 30, and very fashionable. Is everyone who dresses well a cunt? So far, yes. But in the end I had this creeping suspicion that the dick may have known more than me and just didn’t let on. Oh life!
• The old painters could create a more interesting street scene. More happened on the streets back then. Our job is harder but in an unexpected way. We don’t have to get the drafting right but the timing. We have to make sure all of the boring complexity of life, cars, strollers, hipsters are out of the background before making the picture.
• Canaletto had some interesting streetscapes at night which I now can’t remember at all. No internet to check. But may have been relevant to my night work.
• Detail took time. They start appearing in the best work. E.g. Backer.
• Flemish. Overwhelmingly black but totally legible. Very, very beautiful, sophisticated. Instantly liked them. May buy a couple.
• I envied the light falling on the black clothing and how much a painter can reveal with his brush that is far more difficult to do with a camera and lights. Although you wouldn’t be able to see it in real life, they painted in the shadow areas the detail that would have been there and this gives the clothes far more depth. Lace work gorgeous. Hands very good. Technically some of the best things I’ve seen.
• The Flems beauty, sophistication comes from the high contrast, high detailed, highly … ‘discrete’ aesthetic they had. Some of the paintings were hyper-realistic. Beyond what was there in the first place. Some are nearly cartoon like in the strength and definition of their lines.
• The white, when used, is a shock and must have been difficult to balance in the paintings.
• Some still lifes but low contrast, dark, not very interesting.
• Maes had a great concept of lighting.
• Not very impressed by de Hooch. Boring contrast. Lack of mood. Flat. Maybe he was one for subtlety and maybe I was moving through too fast at this point.
• Vermeer’s colours in the dark are very good. Very beautiful. He sees what happens to colours in low light. Some of my night work is too low contrasty. Underexposed. The colours have become gray. I see now that the bar for my night photography is going to be very very high. I wonder if the Canon 5DII is actually the right compromise in terms of the high ISO and detail. Is it’s high ISO actually good enough at 3200?
• Sometimes even in one painting a painter will put in an amazing amount of effort into one part an you can see the brush work in other parts are lazier. I’m sure it’s not an aesthetic choice in that period. Not the best painters of course.
• Rembrandt was really rough with lines sometimes. I didn’t know that about him. It is different to what had come before and what was being done around him I think. I was very surprised to see it besides all of the other very detailed, sharp work. But then walking a bit further I could see that he was capable of the most detailed, contrasty work to rival any of them. He had amazing range as a painter. A true great. Sometimes he also placed the subject a bit too far to the left or right, but this was very interesting after the uniform centring of everyone else. You can see a strong intelligence and an artist working and correcting that I couldn’t easily discern in many of the others. Perhaps you need to see a body of work to make a better judgement on this stuff.
• Ruisdael had some good dark landscapes.
• The lighting is so good sometimes. It really shows the subject as three dimensional.
• There were fashionable girls around even at that time and the painters loved to paint them even then.
• I was really inspired by this stuff. The level of detail that some of these painters got to in their large paintings is beyond what is possible with the cameras I can afford. This is something to aim for. You really can’t get a sense of all this from small book reproductions. You have to stand in front of a Van Dyak 4 meter length, 2 meter high painting to get it. It’s fucking impressive.
• De Keyser is good of course but a little obvious. A little boring.
• I have to get a good book (or find one in the library now that I’m poor) on all of these guys. I don’t really know who’s who and I want to see more of their work. Paris is going to be a good place maybe for that.
• I moved through the museum at a different pace. Walk quickly into a room, pick out what’s new, and what I like and walk over to that and then spend some real time looking. Have the confidence to do that. A big museum often becomes repetitive, you need to get out of it what you want to get out of it. What you need.

• review
• flemish
• art

Posted 11 months ago