Hair and Makeup - sculpture and 3d painting

My son was chatting online to one of his friends the other day, who was getting ready for a party. He was bemused by the fact that she was going to allow an hour to do her hair and makeup..with the comment that "I can get ready in 10 minutes....5 if I'm out of bed when I start".  So I explained to him that what he was seeing was in fact art of the highest level, which is something that I suspect a lot of people don't think about.

Makeup; something women put on their faces, right? Well now that depends. On one level it can be a bit of lipstick or eye shadow or blusher...but at the other end it's multiple layers of toning shades all with varying levels of translucency, applied with a variety of brushes and pencils. If somebody does it with paint on paper then everybody acknowledges it as an art form, but somehow not if somebody is doing it on a 3d surface, in a mirror. How bizarre is that?  What's more, women have to pull this trick off with a colour palate limited by what they happen to be wearing.

Hair: guys if you think making this look good in anything beyond a ponytail is easy then find a long-suffering female acquaintance and try it on them. You just have to take several thousand very fine fibres, which may or may not be slippery, and turn them into something stylish and pretty to look at! Again if this wasn't something women did on themselves to make themselves look good then it would be acknowledged immediately as an art form.

So, every day millions of women and girls, some of them in their mid-teens, pull off amazing feats of artistic skill and dexterity....

Appreciate it for what it is!

The PRB - my long term and variable relationship

I've had a long-term, and very fluctuating relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites; we've been together on and off since the 70s. In my late teens I was very taken with them, I loved the colours and the scenes in a way which one might normally associate with a particular kind of artisticly over-wrought teenage girl, the sort with long hair, long dresses and with an excessive enthusiasm for black, crimson and purple. Then I went off them for a fair while because I found them a bit too over-done, too romantic, a bit too, well, teenage girl with long hair, long dresses and an over-enthusiasm for crimson, black and purple. In the last few years I've re-engaged with and found that I'm more positive again; though not uncritically. I'm with whoever it was who said that Millet's Ophelia managed to make dying beautiful, though I have trouble these days with things like A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids - a painting which frankly I want to spend less time looking at than I would have to saying the title.

How Millet could have produced Ophelia and then gone on to paint Bubbles is beyond me, she's mesmerically beautiful and tragic (with of course the whole story of Lizzie Siddel catching cold in the bath)...Bubbles is just an exercise in mawkish sentimentality. Blech. Let's be honest, if you had to be dead wouldn't you, just a bit, want to look like Ophelia? Would you, really, want your kids to look like Bubbles?  Eve of St Agnes, liking that one.

Holman Hunt is a bit too keen on shoving Christanity down the viewer's throats, though there is something of the gothic I think in The Scapegoat and you do get all the bit about having to go abroad to marry his wife's late sister which gives him a bit of romantic shine. Can't stand The Light of the World, never could. sorry.

Which of course leaves the most Byronic of the Boys in the Band..the rockstar of the PRB, Rosetti. A painter who, for good or ill, has linked every girl with long wavy hair with the word 'pre-raphaelite' (including at times when younger, my wife). At his best, he's amazing as in his drawings of Lizzie and his drawn self portrait, and I've always had a soft spot for Ecce Ancilla Domini! though I'm not sure I can put my finger on why. Then you get all those over-lush portraits of women which are verging on pinups...well okay they are pinups. Got to admit it some of them are cute though a lot of them are clearly the work of a man who knows there's a market for pictures of cute women especially if you dress them up in some kind of classical label.

Do I think they deserve their place on chocolate boxes, table mats and 'artistic' girls bedroom walls? Yep, definitely, and I think that both Millet and Rosetti who both in later life worked out that painting stuff people will buy is a good thing :-)

The Future of Design Requires Free thinking and 'Free' Software

Or at least, very cheap software.

The creators of the visual world of tomorrow are in schools now. If we want an amazing visual world tomorrow then we've got to nurture them today, we've got to build their confidence and let them practice. We've also got to show all the kids that this is for them; I don't mean that they should all do it, or even want to do it, but we've got to show them that if they want to then they can.

The problem is that the digital tools for this are expensive. In some cases very expensive. I'm not going to name names here but some software, while still sold much more cheaply into schools than it is into industry is still very expensive in the constrained budgets for education. If we want top flight and excited visual creatives in the future we've got to give them time to play with the tools now (the lack of time to play in the crowded modern curriculum with the multitude of targets and grading is another issue). I'll will name-names and praise Autodesk for biting the bullet and giving schools and their students free access to their stuff saying "The challenges of today will be solved by the designers of tomorrow. That's why Autodesk gives students, educators and educational institutions free* access to professional design software, creativity apps and real-world projects. Autodesk Education helps to inspire and prepare the next generation to imagine, design and create a better world." - okay so the folks at Autodesk have twigged it, you want designers tomorrow you've got to let them play with the toys today.

Sure, there are brilliant free tools out there like GIMP and Blender, but you come up against the issue that most people have only heard the name of one piece of graphics software and will use it generically, like we do 'hoover' for a vacuum cleaner, and believe that you have to use that. And frankly much as I love GIMP if you want to let kids play with the pro tools for graphics and web design now there is one game in town...but that's an expensive game to play for a school. Then there are all the programs used by VFX companies which lots of kids in schools would love to use - now under the Autodesk package they could have Maya or 3Ds  but there are others which would be great to let kids use, even just to play on in extra-curricular clubs, but which are expensive. The core business of these companies is selling into the graphics industry, wouldn't it be an investment in our visual future, and also their future businesses, to either let schools and their students have free use of it, or price it at a peppercorn level?

In ten years I want to be blogging on Visupulse about exciting stuff being produced - I reckon that will be so much more exciting if all the kids in all the schools could play with all the toys

Where I look at online art

There's a whole lot of art out there in t'internet. It's never been easier as an artist to get your work out to a larger audience; not only is it easy to get your work online but there is so much sharing and re-sharing who knows how it will end up. It's also very easy for the lover of visual things to see stuff to excite and inspire..so today's post is a roundup of some of my favourites

Personally, I'm a big fan of Pinterest for finding new art to look at; lots of art of different kinds appear in front of me and I can follow up on it or not depending on how it engages me...also it's a bit Darwinian in that it tends to be the art which is exciting, interesting or engaging which gets shared about which means that most of what I get to see is really rather good, and also because it either shows me stuff from people who have similar tastes in art who have boards I've followed, or suggestions based on what else I've picked.

The big player  in online art is Deviant Art, and there is lots and lots of good stuff there to see. But quite often I find that I'm not seeing it because there is almost too much art being added all the time! According to the entry on Wikipedia DA receives 140,000 new submissions every day; that's a hell of a lot of art! For me that's an almost unworkable amount of art! I can't look at a fraction of that number daily even if I had the time so to do; I'd get image overload. I do find lots of things on DA which I really like, and generally I make a point of following the artists so I can see more of their stuff...in fact it's essential for me to do that in order to manage my experience. Where DA really scores is the number of people who selflessly produce stock images, photoshop brushes, textures and other things for other creative people to use in exchange quite often for nothing more than an acknowledgement.

Another site where people publish their own work which I like is Behance, there is much less content than on DA and it's aimed more at graphic design than fine art- the fact that it's based on creative portfolios makes it a different sort of thing, and the standard is very high and very professional; in fact a lot of people who put their art there are professional designers. Lots of eye-catching things to see. I also like the website of the Depthcore collective and I'm a daily viewer of Creative Bloq, Dezeen and This is Colossal all of which have great art and design content added daily. Recently I've also started using Flipboard and Stumbleupon to see a range of art and design content from around the web.

That's my own list, there are loads more places out there to see art online - what are your favourites?

Klimt, forget the gold leaf, enjoy the scando-crime landscapes

I've always been unconvinced by Klimt.  For a start there's all that gold leaf..okay frankly it's mainly all that gold leaf which puts me off, along with the pyscadelic patterns. Every year I have an art calendar in the bathroom (I do a lot of my artistic thinking in the bath), where I can ponder it from the bath and I have to look at the same image for a month so I can take it in properly. I've gone for Klimt this year because that way I'll have a year to consider him properly...thus far after 22 days of looking at his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I'm not coming round to liking it..I'm not sure it does her many favours either; paint her...but then slam so much gold leaf round her that it looks like she's staring out of it. But at least I'm giving him a go.

But a few months ago, before January so before I made my calendar choice, I found he did landscapes too and those really quite took my breath away (and not only because of the total absence of gold leaf).  I'm looking forward to whatever month this year gives me one of those.  Every year Klimt left Vienna and went off to the Attesee to paint for fun - locals called him the 'Forest Demon' apparently, which when you look at photos of him and remember that he seldom wore underwear gives one rather pause for thought I think. I'm busy waiting for a major UK gallery to have a Klimt landscape show, I'll be there in a heartbeat. He did a number of subjects, lakes, forests, flowers..okay the flowers are a bit psychadelic..maybe he'd been consuming mushrooms while painting...but nowhere near as over the top as the portrait commissions. But it was the forests which I really warmed to, and found myself thinking of ScandoCrime.

Yes in true Visupulse blog style I'm taking a huge leap from the Attersee of the 1880s to the televisual Scandavia of the 21st century here, but bear with me.  You'll see the point in a bit..or maybe you won't but it's my blog and I'll run with this.

I love scando-crime dramas, The Killing, The Bridge (not the knock off American ones), Wallander (Sorry Ken, the Swedish ones with Krister Henricksson not the UK produced ones), love them all. In fact there is going to be a blog post entirely on them soon. Assuming you've seen them you may be cottoning onto where I'm headed; think of those endless forests with nobody in them in which either somebody finds a body or is murdered..got that? Okay now take a look at this Klimt birch forest...  The colours are punchier than the gorgeous desaturated ones in scando-crime, but the sense of trees going on for ever with nobody there is the same, the feeling of being hemmed in, the glimpses of sky. It's only a matter of time before somebody trips over a corpse or gets hacked to bits. They're not 'our' forests, you don't get the feeling that they're anywhere in the UK, they're not Epping or the New Forest, they're not full of deer and birds...they're not full of anything else but trees and you, the observer (and possibly the killer and/or victim). They're not warm friendly forests in which one might take a stroll after Sunday lunch, they're the primal forests of Northern European folklore, they're the forests where red riding hood met the wolf, where you might find Rapunzel's tower, where Hansel and Gretal are kidnapped.

But they're lovely paintings, the colours on the tree trunks and the forest floor, especially where he's gone for a very pale light and muted tones. He understands trees, he's spent a lot of time looking at them and he's really engaged with them. I think he's a lot more engaged with them than he is with all the society beauties of Vienna: I think he likes the patterns more which is why the women seem stuck in the middle of them. When he's doing forests there is only the repetative patterns of the trees. Sure, he'll take your money to paint your wife but he'll spend the time (and a lot of your money) doing the patterns rather than them.

Of course there are the strange unearthly women from some the Beethoven Frieze or the works the SS detroyed, and who could have come straight out of the forests....

The 9 Most Annoying Things Every Graphic Designer Does

This was on Creative Bloq the other week...I'm not a professional graphic designer but as I like design, and I'm a very visual person, let's see how I did :-)


1. Buys anything that has a nice packaging

According to Sue, I'm guilty as charged on this one. To be fair I don't buy anything that has a nice package but I find I want to a lot of the time...and I did buy a packet of Kallo breadsticks the other week for no reason other than the fact that I loved the packet illustration - the font of the box is now on my pinboard. Back in the early 80s when we first got together Sue could never fahom how when I went shopping I bought Preto's 'basics' marmalde and corn flakes...but would then counter any financial saving by getting the tissues which came in the prettiest box: I'm still a sucker for a pretty tissue box by the way. So yeah, I'm putting my hands up for it, but then again why not have lots of things in pretty boxes to make your home a prettier place?


2. Critiques the menu design of a restaurant every single time they dine

Not guilty. We don't dine out very often so don't really see that many menus. The last place we ate out was Le Manoir and everything at Le Manoir is beyond criticism. That doesn't mean that I've not done the 'ooh, I love that font' thing (see number 3, below) when we do eat out though.


3. Downloads every beautiful font they see

Okay, I don't download them all...but I do download a fair few. I do have a tendency though that when one of the students at work wants a font downloaded and installed to find myself thinking that it looks either nice or fun..then taking a copy of it home to use in a future piece of work...which may or may not actually appear. Though I did once bring a student-picked font home and found exactly the right use for it.


4. Listens to music you've never heard of

What music have you heard of? Seriously in a lot of cases this is only because I like the music from my youth..and a lot of people I talk to are younger than that...a lot younger. I also do tend to like singer-songwriters who don't make mainstream. But I don't think I exclusively listen to music people have never heard of


5. They make your instagram photos look like trash

Nope, there are loads of people who aren't even designers who make my instagram photos look like trash! Innocent of all charges


6. Critques every advertisment they see

Innocent again. I'm very generous to the world of print advertisements...unless they've got really ropy photoshop in them, like this one, which I seriously hope is intended to not look realistic....please....


7.They will close your website if it's old school

I don't manage websites, and I'm not a web designer so not guilty...the fact that I redesigned the bat group website without bothering to ask or tell anybody on the committee because I thought it looked very old-fashioned as it was doesn't count because I was in charge of that one..


8. Gets mad if they ask you for a high-res photo and you paste it in word

Who doesn't hate it when people do that? Why does anybody do that anyway?  Really, why?  You must have the picture in the first place, why paste it into a word document and THEN send it It's not quicker, or easier!. People who do this should be lined up and shot....


9. Prefers beautifully designed front book covers

I wouldn't buy a book just for the beautifully designed cover....though the cover has made me open a fair few in Waterstones. Probably counts as innocent of the charge? 

Degas - Le Coiffure (and other women in a state of dishabille)

You know this one. 

It's big..it's a whole lot bigger than you expect it to be. It's red...yep, it's red alright. It's got a lot of hair, well okay the painting doesn't have any hair but the woman in it has. It's La Coiffure by Degas and it's in the National Gallery. Like a lot of paintings, it's more impressive in real life than it is in reproduction. The colour really pops out at you and the size is, for me, always a surprise; a sort of fine arts version of "I was expecting somebody taller", only in reverse. It's one of the ones I always make sure I see when I'm in the National Gallery, so I thought it would make a good Visupulse topic.



A woman is sitting in a chair while a woman combs her hair, given that outfit that the woman with the comb is wearing you jump to the conclusion that it's a maid but when you think it through it could easily not be, in fact the blouse with the little bow at the neck does look a bit impractical for a working outfit. So maybe it's a mother and daughter? But then again all those red curtains somehow suggest something a bit more opulent than a domestic scene - if you can afford all those velvet drapes then surely one could run to a maid to do the brushing? So are they just friends? What exactly is going on here. Obviously it's not a real scene, it's posed, Degas didn't dash into somebody's home at the right moment and shout "hold it there! just let me get my sketchbook out" and then work it up later. He's set up the composition, one assumes got a couple of women to model for it, then produced the painting. So the question is actually what do we want to interpret as going on here? And that's a whole lot more open than if he'd made the context explicit. If you compare it with the painting Haret flettes by Christian Krohg in Oslo, which shows a girl having her hair braided (it's a delightful painting by the way, worth seeing if you're in Oslo) you can see how it's a lot harder to unpick, or de-tangle one might say, the Degas. You've got to make your own story out of this one.


I ran the photo past some friends of mine with long hair and they all agreed that it was very reminiscent of what having their hair combed when they were younger was like..right down to the look of discomfort on the girl's face! Degas has got the reality right here. It's not a pleasent experience for her, that hand on her forehead seems to be either showing where it hurts or trying to take a bit of the tension off. The woman with the comb seems very relaxed an in the zone, she's clearly enjoying it or at least enjoying whatever she's day-dreaming of while she's doing the brushing. You've got to wonder who is in control here, it looks like the woman with the comb really. So it could be a mother/daughter, or it could be a madam/working girl, or it could be a relationship with BDSM overtones - there's a bit in Sarah Walter's book Affinity where the heroine is reduced to tears by her maid's brushing and the maid not only brushes harder but makes the heroine count all 100 strokes. This could easily be a caption for this painting.


There is a theory that Degas was a misogynist, he was definitely a conservative and an anti-semite, but the jury is out on his attitude to women. One of his friends said of him that "Degas enjoyed the company of women! He, who often depicted them with real cruelty, derived great pleasure from being with them, enjoyed their conversation and produced pleasing phrases for them." (quote in this rather good article); I'm not sure he disliked women per se, but I do find myself beginning to wonder if he rather fantasized about cruelty to them, or at least finding themselves in positions in which they're the victims.


Which brings me onto another recent Degas experience. I went to Cezanne and the Modern at the Asmolean a while back. In it was a Degas called 'After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself' which I just kept coming back to. It's first of all the pose, nobody dries themselves like that: I'm not an art historian and I don't know all the back story to Degas and his works, but that painting is about her bum. Get somebody to shoot that today as a photograph with a model and try to convince anybody it's about somebody drying themselves, go on, dare you. She's bending over the arm of a sofa for heaven's sake, who dries themselves over the arm of a sofa? The other thing was the skin tone, it wasn't healthy, when you stand next to this large photo and really see it there is a quite nasty tone to it, sort of green...sort of...meat gone bad...sort of...dead. Personally, I think it's creulty smut with a tasteful label to it. Then again so are a lot of the other Degas bathroom scenes; this one for example.

Though this one seems to have less of a sexual dynamic to it, she's combing her hair in a way I've seen real girls do without any sign of discomfort, and she's got a rather healthy skin tone too rather than that bruised green of the girl drying herself.


Okay, so I'm not trying to create a "50 Shades of Grey in Oil Pastels" out of Degas here, lots of his stuff is very straight art: think of all those ballerinas, or folks at the races for example, and lots of his pictures of women at their toilette (nobody says that any more, which I think is a shame) are sympathetically drawn and absolutely beautiful. But I do think that there are some of his pictures which go beyond that (and they are still great and visually lovely pictures) to a place where the woman is more victimised.


So, you make your own story out of La Coiffure, you get to decide who they are and what's going on. Is she about to get her hair put up stylishly, change the slightly frumpy frock for a ball gown and dance the night away...is she getting brushed out after such an evening...or what? I'm not sure quite what story I'm going with, every time I look at it I come up with a different one!