I found a great book called Landscape into Art, by Kenneth Clark at the library. In the chapter called “Landscape of Fantasy”, Clark explains that fifteenth century artists, such as Grunewald, Altdorfer, and Bosch, began to explore the “mysterious and the unsubdued” and that they used the landscape to “excite a pleasing horror.” He continues to describe their methods as romantic and even compares them to J.M.W. Turner’s. Pictured below images that are directly and indirectly related to the reading. I found some of them through searches in http://www.wga.hu and http://www.artstor.org. I was specifically looking at how each artist depicted the landscape and architecture, as well as the overall composition and the sky.
In order from left to right:
Scenes from Monastic Legends. Paolo Uccello or the Karlsruhe Master
Saint Barbara (unfinished panel). Jan van Eyck
The Two Hermits from the Isenheim Altarpiece. Grunewald
Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Ship. Giovanni di Paolo
View of Toledo. El Greco
Mount Sinai. El Greco
Scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula. Meeting of the Betrothed Couple and the Departure of the Pilgrims. Vittore Carpaccio
Journey of the Magi. Benozzo Gozzoli
Bibliography:
Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. Britain: HarperCollins, Publishers, 1991.
I just uncovered two quotations and a sketch I had made from last spring, from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. I had intended to make an illustration that could be presented next to one of the quotes – which never happened – but the quotes are thought-provoking and worth reading. Maybe I’ll get around to illustrating them one day…
“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
“But we should never forget that what we call complicated or even wonderful is not at all wonderful for Nature, but quite ordinary. We always tend to project into other things our own difficulties of understanding and to call them complicated, when in reality they are very simple and know nothing of our intellectual problems.”
If you have ever merged multiple layers (Layer > Merge Layers) that have different blend modes you may have noticed that the blend mode effects are not maintained and the merged version looks different than the un-merged version.
Try this method instead:
Make sure that the layers you want to merge are the only ones visible.
Create a new blank layer and select it.
Use this keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E. This merges all visible layers onto the selected layer.
That’s it! You can now delete the layers that were merged and all of the blend mode effects should be maintained.
“But we should never forget that what we call complicated or even wonderful is not at all wonderful for Nature, but quite ordinary. We always tend to project into things our own difficulties of understanding and to call them complicated, when in reality they are very simple and know nothing of our intellectual problems.”
“Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen. Always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisel of other people, this analysis of other people’s motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presupposes a whole world-laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.”
“Our attitude must be like that of the mountain pine… It does not get annoyed when its growth is obstructed by a stone, nor does it make plans about how to overcome the obstacles. It merely tries to feel whether it should grow more toward the left or the right, toward the slope or away from it. Like the tree, we should give in to this almost imperceptible, yet powerfully dominating, impulse – an impulse that comes from the urge toward unique, creative self-realization. And this is a process in which one must repeatedly seek out and find something that is not yet known to anyone.”
Marie-Louise von Franz was one of Carl Jung’s closest followers. Her contribution to the book Man and his Symbols is the chapter titled The Process of Individuation.
“Anyone who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness and fear, will never know what happiness is. Even worse, he will never do anything to make other people happy.”
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche
I am leaving for the mountains of northern Virginia today, to vacation with my parents. I always start to read poetry before a trip. There is something incredible about leaving all of the day-to-day business of my life. Hopefully I will return with some residual incredible feelings.
