Portrait of M. Victor Hugo (1879) by Léon Bonnat. Click for hi-def image. (Via)
Art
On Voluptas
“Nulla sine merore voluptas” — no joy without sorrow. Detail from “The Merchant Georg Gisze” by Holbein (1532).
Horace: Artless art
“The art lies in concealing the art.”
Horace
Creative Process
“Creative Process” by Christoph Niemann
An artist’s name
The ancient masters of Japanese art were allowed to change their name once in their lifetime. They had to be very selective about the moment in their career when they did so. They would stick with their given name until they felt they had become the artist they aspired to be; at that point, they were allowed to change their name. For the rest of their life, they could work under the new name at the height of their powers. The name change was a sign of artistic maturity.
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
Rainy Day
Van Gogh Museum
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has a beautifully designed web site with, apparently, the entire collection available in eye-popping high resolution. It is amazing what detail you can see in these high-res images, right down to the brush strokes and globs of paint. It is as if the museum guards all turned their backs and allowed you to press your nose right up to the canvas. Above is a detail from “Wheatfield With Crows” (1890), one of the last pictures Van Gogh painted before his suicide. The complete picture is below, and you can click the image to see it a little larger. But to get the full effect, go download the insanely huge image at the museum’s web site.
In May, the Met in New York posted 400,000 high-res images from its collection, so this seems to be a trend.
Winter
“Yosemite, Plan View, 2012” by Dan Holdsworth. More of Holdsworth’s amazing photos here.