Art and technology.

Painter and photographer David Hockney has migrated from a paint brush and camera to an iPhone and iPad to create new works of art.

He creates images on his iPad and sends them to friends. The app he uses is named Brushes – click the picture below for more:

As this fascinating article from NPR relates, Hockney is so intense when using the iPad and Brushes that he occasionally wipes his finger on his smock, forgettting that he is not using a real brush loaded with paint!

Most intriguingly, his current Paris show is displayed on iPads to any of which he can simply send a new image when he feels like it – a dynamic, ever changing exhibit which will make multiple visits worthwhile and is surely the right way to display photographs in the modern age. I wrote of this concept over four years ago suggesting that ever cheaper LCD televisions would be the display ‘canvas’ of the future. LCD displays have halved in cost since I wrote that earlier piece. though it seems like the iPad beat the TV to the punch in Hockney’s capable hands.

Were I a photo gallery curator, I would chuck out all the frames, fire the framers and printers and museum guards, buy 50 iPads and 50 big screen TVs and advertise “See our latest show – no two days alike. Come as often as you like with a show pass allowing any number of visits for just 50% more than the regular price. See photographs in their true splendor and dynamic range.”. Result? Costs halved, revenues up 50%. Gallery saved at a non-recurring cost of $60k. Further, sell each show as a download at the conclusion of the exhibit and really clean up. Oh! yeah, and sell all those dumb ass prints to collectors to pay for the hardware and severance costs.

There are still those who maintain that the iPad is a device purely for consumption. Disregard these luddites.

aka Michelangelo Merisi.

No painter has so influenced photography and photographers as has Caravaggio, whom NPR amusingly and accurately refers to as the first of the “Bad Boy artists”. An exhibition in Rome is celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death and you can read more of this master by clicking the picture below.

I prefer the version that has him dying in a sword fight as it seems so in character with the man. Brawler, debauched party goer and totally original genius. His use of light and shade is as fresh today as it was four centuries ago.

On of the best episodes of Simonn Schama’s ‘The Power of Art’ illustrates Caravaggio’s life with some stunning recreations of his signature pieces, not least ‘The Calling of St. Matthew’. You can rent it from Netflix. It’s clear that while his commissions came largely from the Catholic Church (who else had money back then?) his art is about as secular as it gets. Another reason to adore his work.

The first snapshot artist.

While Spaniards may have hated Napoleon for the invasion of their nation and the destruction of the ruling Bourbon dynasty they should, in fact, have been grateful to the French dictator. By hastening the end of monarchical rule, Napoleon effectively put a simultaneous end to the power of the Catholic church in Spain and ushered in a secular constitution with representatives elected by the people, not by Rome. Poor Spain. We think nothing of damning modern religious dictatorships while conveniently forgetting the cruelest of systems which denied citizens even the basest rights. That system, of course, was the Spanish Inquisition.

Nations of all stripes continue to use similar tactics today to deny people their rights – torture and execution in the name of the state – though the excuse is now national security rather than exorcism of witches. And the actions of our rulers are no more representative of the will of the people than were those of the Bourbon kings of old.

In the thick of all of this back in the days of the Inquisition was the Spaniard Francisco Goya (1746-1828). He was lucky to have died in his bed. While he took on a number of church projects – who wouldn’t when trying to put bread on the table – he was the most secular of painters. In his powerful etchings and sketches of the horrors of war and the Inquisition he documented, as never before, the evils committed in the name of a ruling power. His anti-war work reached a peak never before scaled by Western art in his painting of French soldiers executing loyalists on May 3, 1814. This snapshot-like vision was conjured up from his imagination, as he was too old and too deaf to be traipsing about the streets of Madrid while its citizens were waging guerilla war against the French enemy,

Goya – May 3, 1814, Madrid

Modern times make it far simpler to record the horrors of armed conflict and that fact takes away much of the power of the message. We are numbed by so much of this that it no longer gets through. While the most famous picture of the Vietnam war undoubtedly speeded America’s defeat and exit, few remember it now. It is Eddie Adams’s picture of a Viet Cong having his head blown off.

Unlike Goya’s snapshot, Adams had no need of imagination. He just had to be there. There’s a newsreel of the same event so it’s not like he was the only photographer there or the only one to see this ‘photo op’ coming. And, to his lasting surprise, he helped end a war in much the same way that Goya’s snapshot put paid to the Spanish peoples’ prosecution by church, state and invader. The difference is that Goya was recording with intent whereas Adams was just another guy with a camera.

And while Adams’s picture, in its own way, is no less powerful than Goya’s, I need not ask which you would rather have hanging on your wall.

A fascinating subject.

Some three years ago I wrote a brief piece on Aspect Ratios after acquiring my Panasonic LX-1 which came with a widescreen 16:9 picture option.

While 30 years with film Leicas has me pretty much convinced that 3:2 is the best for me (and that’s what I use most often on both the LX-1 and the G1; the 5D is, of course, 3:2, take it or leave it) a recent email from a reader got me thinking about the subject again.

Peter writes:

A subject that has annoyed me forever is the disconnect between common print and frame sizes and the aspect ratio of the most broadly used cameras.

The most common size for enlargements and frames is still 8×10. What percentage of photographers do you think are still using 4×5? How obscure is 11×14?

The move from 5×3.5 to 4×6 took hold just as digital was coming in at 4×3. And why 4×3? Because cathode ray tubes for TV were that size and could be used for early computers. As a fan of 16:9, I pretty much have to crop anything that needs to be printed.

Peter, by the way, typically views his digital pictures on a large screen LCD TV which, of course, is 16:9, consonant with the widescreen format used by most moviemakers today.

Rather than dwell on photographs, I thought it might be fun to pull twelve favorite paintings from memory and take a look at their aspect ratios, so here they are, in no particular order. These have been in my mind’s eye for, what, 45 years (I am 58)? With the sole exceptions of the Raphael and Uccello, both of which are carefully posed, all the others share an almost photographic snapshot vision, never more so than in the two Degas examples. No surprise, really, as that’s the way I tend to see things. To keep matters simple, I show the aspect ratios in the order longest side: shortest side, regardless whether the format is portrait or landscape:

I learned some interesting things from this little exercise. 4:3 and 3:2 dominate in my choices. Had you asked me what ratio Noli Me Tangere or La Grenouillere or The Bather or Baignade were, for example, I would have sworn up and down that they are 16:9 or even longer! Turns out nothing could be further from the truth. And, indeed, when you look at vast canvases like Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (Louvre, National Gallery, Uffizi) their unusually broad aspect ratio for the times – 16:9 and the only ‘widescreen’ painting here – is an awful lot to take in.

So maybe 16:9 is really largely a modern development, one of the movie age, because classical art uses it rarely. I realize that a dozen selections hardly constitute ‘Classical Art’ but I doubt you will find too many widescreen paintings ….

Thanks for those thoughts, Peter.

And as I’m dying to answer the question “Which of the above would you like on your wall at home?” let me say there’s no contest. By a huge margin it’s that magnificent Botticelli work at the beginning of this piece, prosaic as its 4:3 format may be. It’s in London’s National Gallery and once you enter the large gallery in which this very small painting is exhibited you will understand why.