"gonzo" <rgo### [at] lansetcom> wrote in message
news:3f92f847@news.povray.org...
|
| Who's expectations, the viewers or the artist?
| I also think that photorealism is overemphasized
| in raytracing, yet it seems its the artists
| generally who perpetuate this, not the viewer.

Photo-realism isn't what I meant. I was speaking about the noticeable
and of course accurate perspective in cg drawings and photographs. When
I'm driving, the road ahead of me looks flat, but in a photo or CG
render, the road, earth, ocean, bottom of a building, whatever appears
to rise up to meet the sky. This is of couse true even in real life, but
I don't really think about it unless looking at a picture. I hope that
made at least some sense.

The whole discrepancy might be all in my head. I have incredible spatial
skills when it comes to tests where shapes need to be rotated around in
your head, or chess, making a shape out of other shapes, or any of that
IQ test type stuff. Once I pick up a pencil, however, I am lost. I can't
sketch even the simplest thing. Sometimes it feels like I can really see
something on the paper, but even then, I can't even draw a close
approximation. When I see the planning sketches of some CG artists, I
think "Damn, if I could draw like that, I wouldn't even bother with CG."

|
| Tricky... focus too much on presentation and the subject
| blurs...  the viewer, unless they are another artist,
| loses interest. So the challenge for the artist is to find
| a new perspective, and then balance subject and presentation
| in such a manner as to draw the viewer in such a way as to
| allow them to find that perspective.

Problem is, the presentation might have been "borrowed" in the first
place. I didn't know about this guy until a week ago, so hopefully Jim
will drop in here with a little history if I'm wrong, but it appears
that the look which we associate with surrealism was stolen from:
http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Chirico.html .

I really think that the challenge is to walk away from (Dali/Magritte
type) surrealism completely. Some things are magnificent, but only hold
enough potential for one or a few artists. Rockabilly music is a good
contemporary example. It all sounds the same because even the slightest
change from the formula makes it *not* Rockabilly music. This is
equivalent to an entire art movement being centered around the works of
Piet Mondrian.

|
| I'd like to try this experiment with several artists all contributing
| objects (and no one can see the other objects until a specified number
| have been produced), then each artist uses the same random set of
| selections to brainstorm. I'd be curious to see what each produced.

A simpler way would be to put in a very general word like 'opening',
'tomorrow', 'similar', or 'way' into a search engine and to then take
the 50th page from the search and extract all of the concrete nouns.

|
| Well, my intent was to produce something in the spirit of the original
| movement (see my remarks about "look" -vs- "movement" in my reply to
| Jim's post).  The fact that you and some of the other comments
referred
| to the result as "traditional" and "classic" makes me think I
succeeded
| in that, but whether that has any meaning or validity in the present
| and much broader interpretation of surreal is another matter... but it
| was certainly instructive!  I probably learned more from working on
| this round than any other single piece I've done.

Another experiment would then be to take your objects and create
something which is as far away from surreal as possible. Just take every
characteristic which you associate with the look of the pictures you
expect to create with the method and reverse each.

This is what I meant when I characterized Jim's image as "antagonistic."
It is a picture of Miro, but appears to me to be very anti-Miro. Jim
posted a link to one of his references, Miro's own protrait of himself.
Here is a link to another of his sources (though perhaps not
specifically this painting):

http://www.moma.org/momalearning/images/pop_ups/miro_small.jpg

 -Shay

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