Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

I added this to the “about” page – here’s a link to display (in random order) all the psychedelic images that rotate through the banner of this blog.

A FLYING HAMSTER!!! AND A FLYING WALRUS, TOO!!!

Click the images for much larger ones (they fit on my work computer desktop The hamster is a mod of a wondrous image I found with this search and combining it with images from this and this search.

A glorious related page that came to my attention a while after I made this is I HAS A BUCKET, which is part of a wider hilarious phenomenon known as LOLcats, which began as folks at various web sites posting silly pictures of cats with sillier captions in IM chat-like misspellings, beginning apparently with this priceless gem. This is celebrated at I Can Has Cheezburger? Dot Com, which is a site I have come to adore and find a lot of great amusement at.

[The pictures in this post need fixing!  And many others since my blog update!  Sorry!]

My brother brought these.. adjective-defying photographys of Saturn to my attention. They were taken last year by the Cassini space craft. This is from “the other side” of Saturn. The first on that page is the nearest approximation they can make to natural color; that’s how it might look to human eyes. Note, as mentioned on this page, that the Earth appears in the photograph! – as a small blue dot.

This photograph reminded me that since I was a child -

When on some gilded cloud or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an hour..
-Henry Vaughn

(I highly recommend a text search on that page for those words and a read of that poem) – I’ve deeply loved space photographs. So I’ve now collected a lot of them, and here they are. I also found an Automatic Wallpaper Changer which I’ve started using to rotate these images on my desktop. Click any image for a larger (sometimes much larger – maybe larger than your browser) image. Or, to hoard them all here are two huge pages spitting out the large images – the planetary photography collection and the celestial photography collection. Use the “Save” function from your browser’s file menu, saving it as a “complete web page” – which will grab all the images out. My further words about these images – after the images!
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I think Rhapsidiom’s comments in his post here are right on target.  We exchange comments after his post.

I’ve discovered and love Bernini’s portrayal of David ten times over Michelangelo’s. Michelangelo’s says “I am a superhuman who is thinking hard about my overly idealized form and non-existential pants.”

http://faculty.evansville.edu/rl29/art105/img/michelangelo_david2.jpg

Most of the photos get it wrong by viewing the statue from the level, which is not what it was designed for. It towers as an inverted trapezoid so that David’s head and shoulders are inordinately large, which is not appealing. The purpose of that design was to defy perspective when viewed from below, at a distance, so that David appears near, in front perspecitve, and proportional while he is actually distant and viewed from below. But, and I’m sorry, if the statue is photographed from the angle it was designed to be viewed from -

http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/L18/18-8.jpg

- it places his woinker smack-dab in the center of focus. The eye moves up to head, then right back down to the smack-dab center of focus. And wow, take a look at that. Where’s your Bathsheba now, oh Exposed One?

[I first wrote that the head is stoically stern and emotionally removed. It's not - it's expressive - he looks worried and a bit withdrawn.]

But you know what, it is a very impressive statue, from the correct angle. I understand it’s the culmination of theories on perfect form and harmony in sculpture, etc. Theory. Yawn. It’s just that it only communicates the perfection of the human form, which is very valid and striking in itself. Nonetheless, I just like what Bernini’s statue communicates more -

Bernini’s statue shows David as human, not super-human. He is in action, hastily putting the stone in the sling while looking straight out toward Goliath, with a look of great concentration and I think even defiance on his face, biting his lip. The whole pose is sort of awkward and says “shepherd boy”.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/b/bernini/bernini_david2.jpg
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/baroquetheory/images/berninidaviddet2.jpg
http://artemis.austincollege.edu/acad/art/faculty/Fontana/Bernini%20David%20med.jpg
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/baroquetheory/images/berninidavid.jpg

As I said, I love the second statue. A lot. Ten times over.