Fractal Art

Photo by Don Archer

Benoit Mandelbrot, digital portrait, 2001

Imagine if you will, a whole, new type of art...an art that didn't exist, couldn't even be imagined, as recently as 35 years ago. It's an art based upon geometry; not traditional, Euclidean geometry, but a whole new type of geometry. It's an abstract art, also one that is largely if not entirely serendipitous. It's an art based upon numbers, real and imaginary, and it's an art that, until the advent of computers, couldn't even be produced on paper. And, while it's based upon a formula, it's anything but formulaic. The simple, yet elegant formula is Z=Z X Z+ C, with C being a constant added each time the multiplication of Z X Z takes place. The result is a series of points, that, when connected, create a graphic image of infinite complexity when enlarged. In nature, a snowflake is a crude example, as are mountains, clouds, aggregates and galaxy clusters. And even though the formula is simple, it was the incredible number of calculations needed to produce this new art form which made it unthinkable, indeed, unimaginable before computers came to be fast enough to perform them and create the images.

Though strictly mathematical in origin, Mandelbrot graphics can be exquisitely beautiful.

It's called Fractal art, and it's first practitioner was Benoit Mandelbrot (above), a Polish-born scientist of French descent who came to this country in the 1970s to work for IBM. It was there he developed both Fractal geometry as a new branch of mathematics, and also wrote some of the first computer graphics programs to print out the art his new, abstract form of geometry could create. Mandelbrot was born in 1924. He came from a highly educated Jewish family. While his father was a clothes merchant, his mother was a doctor and his two uncles were both mathematicians. They fled Poland in 1936 for France where Mandelbrot came of age during the strife and uncertainties of WW II. His education in mathematics, economics, engineering, and physiology was constantly interrupted and irregular. In fact, in many areas, he is largely self-taught. As a result, though primarily a mathematician, he came to have a much more abstract view of geometry than he might have had he attended regularly at a university.  He also came to have a much broader grasp of the other sciences and their interrelationship to geometry.

Infinity, a swept fractal based upon the
Manowar set, a more recent application

If fractal geometry images came tightly bound with the development of computers, fractal art came bound with the Internet. A critical element in the definition of art involves it having an audience. It should come as no surprise then that the first fractal artists were some of the first computer "geeks" of the early 1980s. And the first art exhibitions came with one of the first broad, Internet communities in the early 1990s--CompuServe. But during these early years, the art they created was largely just a novelty traded back and forth among its creators. Then in 1994, a New York City high school English teacher named Don Archer, who also moonlighted as a massage therapist, co-founded the Museum of Computer Art (MoCA), not to be confused with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA).

Yes, even Mandelbrot tattoos

Even though this Cornell graduate has been creating and selling fractal art for several years now, perhaps Don Archer's greatest contribution has been in presenting, promoting, and preserving it (and other computer-generated images) through his Internet museum. Although in many ways it operates like any other museum, choosing its artist carefully, presenting them professionally, it has no brick and mortar address. Like Amazon or Ebay, it's only address is a URL, www.MuseumOfComputerArt.com. 

1990s Art

The 1990s--the birth of GIF art, though the X-Men,
created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, date from the 1960s.

It seems hard to believe now, but the art of the 1990s goes back as much as 27 years ago. My, how time flies when you're having fun...or, as Kermit the Frog once said "Time's fun when you're having flies" Speaking of time, Kermit is now old enough for Social Security (62). For me, the 1990s were memorable in that it was the decade which brought us the home computer. We got our first one in 1995 (below). It was a Packard Bell Legend 814CD with a 100MHz Pentium Processor, 8MB, of memory, a 1.2GB 4x NEC CD-ROM Drive, and two Floppy Drives (5.25 disk and the "new" 3.5 disk). Notice, it did not contain a modem. Though the Internet had been around since 1969, dial-up access in the 1990s was both slow and expensive (CompuServe was five cents per minute). I think we paid about $700 for the computer, monitor, and accompanying software (about $1,100 today).

It was not very artist friendly.

Despite a whole bucket of bugs and numerous limitations, digital art began to take hold as the decade progressed. Computers grew friendlier and more powerful by leaps and bounds. Apple prodded Microsoft to forego MS-DOS in favor of Windows, which progressed from 3.1 to Windows 95, Windows 98, and finally, in 2000, Windows ME (Millennial Edition). Some of those operating systems are still in use today. With each new permutation came radical improvements in the capabilities for producing digital art, either from photos or from the "scratch" of the artist's imagination.

Fractal Art--beautiful, but the computer does all the work.

As might be expected, older artists turned technophobic while Millennials embraced the digital revolution. Nerds ruled, and their favored art was fractal, based upon mathematic algorithms ideal for even the relative low-power processors of the day (above). Among the artist who embraced fractal art were Desmond Paul Henry, Hamid Naderi Yeganeh and musician Bruno Degazio. Fractal art is not simply computerized art, lacking in rules, unpredictable, nor something that any person with access to a computer can do well. Instead, fractal art is expressive, creative, and requires input, effort, and intelligence.

Bob Ross, the mighty painter of friendly little trees retired in 1994 after a TV run of seven years.

The Bob Ross Dress

It would be false to relegate an entire decade of art to that which accompanied the advent of low-cost computers and their software. Although painting was starting to decline as a viable form of creative communication, its multi-media challengers, TV, motion pictures, and in its nascent form, digital art, were waiting in the wings. TV had its Bob Ross and Ben Alexander, both of whom retired in 1994. CGI-technology, made its debut in films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, Independence Day, and Titanic. Disney con-tributed the first totally computer animated feature length film, Toy Story in 1995. This they followed with such forgettable epics as Hercules, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and finally Fantasia 2000 (all of which lost money).

Plus dozens of sequels, prequels, and horror films
enough to fill (and sink) the Titanic.

I'm confident there must have been some, but in perusing hundreds of traditional paintings on canvas from the 1990s I didn't recognize a single one as being memorable. That means that few, if any, such work has left a lasting impression on the world of art. In a Postmodern world paintings on canvas are so, for lack of a better term, "modern." That's not to say that artists from other decades didn't continue to produce. They did, but their art had changed little, if at all, from that which the produced decades before which made them famous. So, inasmuch as my own work would seem to be as memorable as any other produced in the 1990s, I'm including Tantalizing (below) dating from 1998 as being representative of the painters art from that era.

Copyright, Jim Lane

Tantalizing, 1998, Jim Lane

The typical American family
of the 1990s.









































 

CGI

Glasses, 2006, Gilles Tran

I have deliberately titled this item with an abbreviation--CGI. Whether you're an artist or not, if you don't know what that means, in today's world, it's high time you learned. CGI stands for Computer Generated Imagery. Its a broad designation, basically including any graphic image generated from a digital source. The image above is NOT a photo. It's CGI. At its most highly refined, realistic best, in today's world of imaging, CGI not just rivals photographic imagery, in many ways, it surpasses it. If one were to look at a mixture of images, both CGI and photographic, the most telling difference would be that the CGI images might appear too perfect. The other major difference, even allowing for present day, state-of-the art photo editing software, would be that CGI allows artists to easily depict scenes impossible (or economically unfeasible) using any other means.

Gilles Tran

CGI is too broad to be a topic here. There are just too many manifestations, from fractal geometry to CAD (computer assisted design), to computer animation. I've already covered a couple of these areas, Fractal Art, Mathematical Art, and Digital Art in the past. Thus, to simplify, I'm going to highlight only one artist and only his CGI art. His name is Gilles Tran. He lives and works in Paris, and though his work is very much at a professional level, he still classifies himself as an amateur. Actually, his "day job" is that of an agronomist. The image at the top is by Gilles Tran. The image of him at right is not. He's a modest man. The photo did not come from his website but from the one where he works. It's the only photo on this page.

Gilles Tran uses POV-Ray software. That stands for Persistence of Vision Raytracer. This software allows the creation of graphic images based upon a text description. No, you can't just type in "draw a box."  As with all things digital, it's a little more complicated than that, though not much. However, there is a learning curve. Actually, the text looks more like the HTML code used to render this page.



<<<===That will get you this.

Here's a sample:

#declare the_angle = 0;

#while (the_angle < 360)
        box {   <-0.5, -0.5, -0.5>
                <0.5, 0.5, 0.5>
                texture { pigment { color Red }
                          finish  { specular 0.6 }
                          normal  { agate 0.25 scale 1/2 } }
                rotate the_angle }
        #declare the_angle = the_angle + 45;
#end

I pride myself in having a "way with words," but I would be speechless in describing the above figure in plain text. CGI has come a long way fast. Gilles Tran created Brittany Night (below, right) when he began experimenting with CGI in 1993. That was pretty much cutting edge, state-of-the art CGI back then. His Glasses (top) was done just thirteen years later in 2006. In addition to POV-Ray, Tran now also uses even more sophisticated software, Cinema 4D, FinalRender and Poser (among others). The two Gilles Tran images below offer a more concise, side-by-side comparison of CGI art then and now.




Lyon Capitale, (magazine cover),
2009, Gilles Tran

Brittany Night, 1993, Gilles Tran,
Created using a PC 386 with 
MS-DOS, 4 Mb of RAM,
and POV-Ray 1.0

DAZ

A Glimpse of Ancient Times, Esteves, (created using DAZ).                    

Every few months I dive into a discussion of art created on a computer. Sometimes I've labeled it digital art, or fractal art, electronic art, or CGI (computer generated imagery). It all sounds complicated. Even the terms tend to induce a spinning head. Although I've probably been guilty of making it all sound very complicated, really, it's not as bad as it would seem. In the beginning, it was. But, one of the hallmarks of digital imaging is the fact that computers tend to make the complex simple...or at least simpler. The more powerful the computer, the less challenging it is for a user to produce a desired result. I started out on a Commodore-64 using a word processing program called EasyScript. Believe me, it was far from easy--horrendously complicated, in fact, requiring me to memorize dozens of menu commands to use it with any degree of efficiency. The first computer drawing programs had similarly steep learning curves (or if they didn't, they weren't worth fiddling with). The same paradigm is at work today in the creation of digital art.

 

Wandering Brian, Szark (Brian is the seated figure in the right, center).

Soft V6, Elele

Although there are one or two others similar in form and function, one of the best pieces of creative software available today is called DAZ (actually, DAZ Studio 4.6 Pro). In the past, such software has been exorbitantly expensive. However, one of the most amazing factors in computer software is the ironic fact that the more powerful (better) it gets, the cheaper it tends to be. DAZ is listed at $249. However, believe it or not, you can actually download it for FREE. Why? Because the DAZ people have lost their minds. No, really, they simply have a somewhat strange business model. It would be like General Motors giving their cars away, but only if you buy all your gas from their dealers. That's right, the program is free, but the content isn't (far from it, in fact).

No extra charge
for nude poses.

 

Meet Victoria and Michael (her foot, his hands). I swear, it's not a photo.

Adam and Eve, Devon Oreschnick

DAZ (Digital Art Zone) had it's birth around about 1999. Her name was Victoria, which would make her about fifteen at the moment. However, one of her primary virtues is that she's really quite ageless. Using DAZ software she can be made to look virtually any age, any height, any build, any size, shape, weight, as beautiful and seductive as the dewy dawn, or as ugly and repulsive as a dark and stormy night. Her male counterpart is Michael, and similar traits apply to him. Each sell for a nickel less than $40. That's Victoria in the role of Eve and Michael playing Adam (left). Even though it's painted entirely with pixels, those pixels don't come cheap. In addition to the modeling fees (each figure has its own software package), the artist also purchased the jungle background ($9.95); the grassy foreground ($14.95); an "Enchanted Forest" ($34.95); the apples ($29.95); Adam's "Surfer Hair" ($14.95); and Eve's "Sultry Hair" ($16.95). If you don't have a calculator handy, I'll be glad to add all that up for you.  It comes to...WOW!!! $201.60. Ah, but the program is free.

Need an antique classic automobile for your painting? There's an app for that...
and you can turn it every which way but loose.

Red Skin, Danny Thesen.
Realism is only one option.

Why so much? Well, as any professional artist will tell you, getting started costs money. Here it doesn't (except for owning a reasonably powerful computer). However, the models, the background, every single, tiny, bit of content has been rendered digitally by a DAZ artist (or subcontractor). All the user has to do is to choose and assemble all the parts in a pleasing manner to suit his or her tastes and purpose. That does not make the creative process exactly what you'd call "easy," nor does it guarantee great (or even good) art. Far from it in fact, regarding both elements. What it does do is to make the creative process more intuitive, and less technical. While it does not, by any means, eliminate bad art, it does tend to facilitate better art. DAZ eliminates most of the need for the artist to be an expert at figure drawing (anatomy), drawing faces, perspective, textures, and greatly reduces the technical problems with color, shading, and lighting by making simple the age old practice of trial and error.

Skin Study, Hellboy.
Screen resolution and visual textures are totally the decision of the artist.

DAZ Dragon, Laticis Imagery

In effect the artist simply makes decisions and "directs" (poses) his models (actors) much as would a movie director, except for the fact the DAZ artist gets instantaneous visual feedback allowing his or her decisions to be quickly and easily "second guessed." The movie director has to wait for the film to be developed. However, like the movie director, DAZ provides a virtually unlimited "back lot," as well as a virtual warehouses full of props, sets, costumes, makeup, wigs, whatever you want or need...for a price. Special effects? Whatever you like...and can afford. Action? Well, that's a little more tricky and time consuming, but animation is built into the software as well. If the action calls for children, whatever the age, there's no agents, no parents, tutors, or child labor laws to worry about. Need a monster? How big? How ugly? How vicious? How hairy? Design your own nightmare based up a DAZ prototype.

Sleeping in an Airline, Story Rendering. Digital modeling and posing solves
many of the problems in creating such an image, but not all of them.
Notice, the head is just slightly too large for the child's tiny body.

Hel, Buda San. Beauty is only skin
deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone.

Although the vast majority of artist using DAZ seem to prefer at least some degree of realism (or Surrealism), neither are mandated. The fact is, DAZ software seems to appeal most to fantasy artists, creators whose wild imaginations have, in the past, far outstripped their technical virtuosity in rendering them. Not any more. Learn-to-paint-and-draw goes out the window. The whole definition of being an artist changes. No longer must he or she be a master of eye-hand coordination, or the owner of a steady hand constantly concerned with neatness and precision. Instead the DAZ artist needs to be gifted with a sharp eye for proportions, composition, visual clarity, atmosphere, posing, expressions, and good taste. These are all intellectual talents feeding into creative genius. The computer in the hands of a digital artist, as with so many other computerized tasks, relieves the artist of the mundane in favor of far greater freedom in the act of creative communication--the very definition of art.

Undead Donuts, Storypilot.
Not a photo, not a painting either, nor very
appetizing; but it makes up in creativity and humor,
not to mention shock appeal, what it may lack in "good taste."

 

Digital Art

Inasmuch as all really creative artists are innovators, they, like those in many other fields, are constantly trying to peer around the corner and see what's coming down the pike before it hits them smack in the face and leaves them for road kill. As Web denizens, some friends of mine on the Net have been trying to do just that, every so often rubbing their eyes and wondering in amazement "What hath God wrought?" echoing the first words ever tapped out by artist, Samuel F. B.  Morse, over a 160 years ago with his telegraph key. It's fitting that an artist of Morse's caliber was the first to move beyond visual and written communication to an electronic medium. Even so, no doubt he too would "rub his eyes" at what's happening now, though I don't think for a minute he'd regret having started it all way back in 1844.

A Mandelbulp--Mandelbrot fractal art
comprises some of the earliest computer
generated digital graphics.

I've preached for some time that the future of wall art is digital just as a hundred years ago, the brightest future in the performing arts was in the then infant medium of motion pictures. This is not to say that traditional arts will not continue to flourish just as has live theater and live concerts today, but the incredible digital art we see on the Internet daily is barely an inkling of what large-scale wall monitors will be able to deliver in the not-too-distant future. Just as today when computers are left running 24-7 and deliver delightful "screen savers," tomorrow these lovely moving images, whether abstract or highly realistic will be seen in landscapes with Java-generated watery ripples the norm, and not just with the Kinkade crowd either!

Digital art also extends to sculpture, either
illusional or actual, depending upon the media.

I dare say, if there's any money to be made from it, even traditional art such as Monet's watery Impressionist paintings will be digitized and animated much in the same way old black and white movies are colorized today. We can lament this technicalization of art all we like but it is going to happen. The hardware is coming, the software is here (and rapidly getting better); all that remains is for the right economic elements to fall into place. That doesn't necessarily mean we won't continue to paint using traditional methods, but just as now, when the really "hot" painters paint for print reproduction, the selling artists of the future will paint for digitization. In fact, inasmuch as digitization is so quick and easy (and perhaps quite lucrative), we may all paint for this method of sales and exhibition. Our landscapes may have rustling leaves and flowing, babbling brooks, our still-lives may not be quite so still (flowers that occasionally drop a few petals), our portraits may smile as someone walks by (their eyes now literally following you around the room), and portraits of dearly departed canine pets will bark a friendly greeting from time to time. Okay, so it seems funny now, a bit spooky, maybe downright frightening in its implications for how we will think and work, but then the future has always been all these things. Keep in mind, a hundred years ago, as crude visual and audio recordings were just coming onto the horizon, philosophers were having to rethink and redefine the meaning of the simple little three-letter word, "now."

This is not a photo...or a painting in the traditional sense. What you see is a digital landscape generated by a computer program called Terragen.

Mathematical Art

Diagnosis Cancer, Titia van Beugen, Dutch mathematical artist.
She died of breast cancer in 2010.

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possess not only truth,
but supreme beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like
that of sculpture.”  --Bertrand Russell
                                         British author, mathematician, & philosopher (1872-1970)

Very often artists, like the majority of other human dwellers upon this earth, are adverse to mathematics. Art and math would seem to be polar opposites--output from opposite hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Few artists might argue with that, though, today, quite a number of mathematicians would. As a young man, I was endlessly fascinated by architecture (still am) but I was never very good at higher mathematics. I hated algebra, was barely on speaking terms with geometry, and terrified by calculus and trigonometry. Slide rules (remember slide rules?) always seemed like more trouble than they were worth, and I was born too soon to benefit academically from pocket calculators. Had all this not been the case, I might have become an architect rather than an art instructor/painter/writer.



The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba,
1450-52, Lorenzo Ghiberti, east door of the
Florence Baptistery--perfect perspective.

Actually the relationship between math and art is long and surprisingly intimate. By the 14th century there was a whole book on perspective by a mathematician named Alhazen, though it took mathematically inclined Florentine artists such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and his friend, Filippo Brunelleschi, to translate his by-the-book formulas into practical applications and teach them to all the mathematically adverse Renaissance artists to follow. Of course, architects such as Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, though artists, have, by necessity, embraced mathematics far more readily than did painters (for reasons outlined above). 

 And that's pretty much where things stood for five hundred years--mathematicians occasionally toying with art, but few artists, like myself, having more than a passing acquaintance with the underlying formulas governing the linear perspective they employed daily. Then came computers. Mathematicians, had, in fact, been graphing their obscure algebraic equations for centuries, but the calculations, not to mention the crudity of their tools, made such efforts way too time consuming to be more than a quickly passing fancy. Mathematicians had better things to do with their valuable time than draw pictures.

 

A Mandelbrot set, featuring
virtually infinite complexity.

With computers, first there was Mandelbrot--Benoit Mandelbrot (02-24-12), an IBM mathematician who, in 1979, with his pioneering work in fractal geometry, was among the first to grasp the fact that the ever-increasing speed of a digital processors erased the primary obstacle in the marriage of art and higher mathematics. But Mandelbrot was a mathematician first, and only an artist, of sorts, more or less by accident. But as computer technology eventually began to rely upon various graphic interfaces, the intricacies of Mandelbrot receded into the realm of fascinating oddity to be replaced by the practical mathematical and artistic demands of counting, collating, and coloring pixels for human consumption. 



Roots grown from multiple seeds using a constrained 3D DLA algorithm,
Paul Bourke, New Zealand mathematical artist



Frabjous, George Hart,
American mathematical sculptor

If you look at today's mathematical artists you find that, like Mandelbrot, they are virtually all mathematicians first, having developed a secondary interest in art. There's even a virtual math museum. Few, if any, of this new breed of artists even own a paintbrush, though some mathematical sculptors rely on traditional tools in giving substance to their computer-aided designs. Like all good artists, mathematical artists create work of great diversity visually, yet it is mostly of an abstract nature often utilizing a great degree of symmetry while having the "cold and austere" beauty Bertrand Russell found so enthralling.

The Apocalipse (Revelation), Anatoly Fromenko, Russian mathematical artist,
work not totally devoid of representational content.

  

 

Anish Kapoor

The Spire, 2004, Anish Kapoor

Not too long ago a reader sent me an e-mail discussing one of my posts at which time he asked, how and where I came up with the broad variety of content areas he found so interesting. There is, of course, no single answer to that. Often they come from a news item I come across on the Internet. At other times they simply reflect some artist or art interest I find fascinating myself and wish to probe deeper, hoping those reading my words will enjoy the effort. In the case of Anish Kapoor, my wife, who has very little interest in art, brought a small news article to my attention. I'm ashamed to admit that the name didn't immediately "ring a bell," though it should have. While in Chicago a few years ago I almost saw (experienced would be a better word) his most famous work. I had, in fact written about the British sculptor's Cloud Gate (below, a.k.a. the "bean") located in that city's Millennial Park. I say I almost saw it inasmuch as the park and Kapoor's massive, polished mass is right next door to the Art Institute of Chicago where I spent an entire day. Had I known the art landmark was so nearby, I would definitely have found the time to pay my respects.

 

Cloud Gate, 2006, Anish Kapoor, the centerpiece of Millennium Park, Chicago.



The news item that caught my wife's eye involved an unfortunate mishap in which an elderly man accidentally fell into one of Kapoor's site specific "sculptures" titled Bottomless. It wasn't, of course, only some eight feet deep with the sides painted black to give the appearance of a bottomless abyss. The Italian man in his 60's was slightly injured from the mishap. Bottomless (left) is a part of Kapoor series called Descent into Limbo displayed at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal. The unfortunate art lover has since been released from the hospital.

Kapoor and curator Suzanne Cotter stand next to Descent into Limbo (1992) at the Serralves museum.

 

 

Along the same line as his earlier Bottomless, Anish Kapoor’s endlessly spinning whirlpool titled Descension (below) has descended on Brooklyn, NY, located at pier 1 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The continuously spiraling funnel of water penetrates the earth in a powerful rush of ceaseless motion, drawing viewers into its mystifying and mesmerizing abyss. It turns an ordinary material (water) into a strangely behaving substance, disturbing the familiar notions of our world. The 26-foot in diameter installation creates a striking jux-taposition to the adjacent East River as it continues Kapoor’s long-standing interest in the destabilization of the physical world. The spiraling whirlpool is treated with an all-natural black dye, creating a seemingly endless hole, into which visitors are invited to carefully peer (this one has a railing).

 

Brooklyn's Descension follows an earlier display as a smaller, interior work at India's Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Anish Kapoor is a leading contemporary British-Indian artist working in large-scale abstract public sculpture. Throughout his career, Kapoor has worked on a variety of scales and with diverse materials—mirrors, stone, wax, and PVC—exploring both biomorphic and geometric forms with a particular interest in negative space. Born in 1954 in Bombay, India, Kapoor moved to London in the late 1970s, studying at both the Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea College of Arts. He first gained critical recognition for his work in the 1980s, with his metaphysical site-specific pieces in which he manipulated form and the perception of space. Kapoor was awarded the Turner Prize in 1991.

 

1000 Names, 1979-80, Anish Kapoor



Tall Tree and the Eye, 2009,
Anish Kapoor, Royal Academy.

One of Kapoor's favorite work is 1000 Names (above), dating from 1979–80. Being from India, Kapoor relates emotionally to the pieces of the work, which are made in pigments with extraordinarily exotic shapes. They are a source of wonder, luscious, beautiful, delicious and very sensual. Those early works were unlike anything ever seen. However, quite apart from his work with pigments, holes, and other disquieting shapes and media, Kapoor is undoubtedly best knows for his "shiny stuff" such his Spire (top) or his Tall Tree and the Eye, seen at right when displayed in Paris in 2009. Kapoor is intrigued by the empty spaces between and within the shapes he has made, and by the endless, repeating "fractal images" reflected on their polished surfaces. Turning the World Upside Down (below) dating from 1996 is typical of Kapoor's "spacey" work.

Turning the World Upside Down, 1996, Anish Kapoor.

 

For the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Kapoor created the ArcleorMittal Orbit (below), now the UK's tallest sculpture. Standing 114.5 meters tall, the sculpture was erected at the cost of a whopping £22.7 million. Designed by Kapoor and structural designer Cecil Balmond, the work is a tangled steel lattice incorporating the five Olympic rings. Sponsors hope the tower will attract one million visitors a year to Stratford's Olympic Park. The ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture, is 22 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty, and has two observation floors with a spiral staircase consisting of 455 steps. The iconic attraction hopes visitors will be attracted by the architectural design and detailed integration; enough to want to take the elevator to the top and then maybe walk down the spiral staircase. Kapoor's enormous sculpture easily dwarfs the aspirations of Gustave Eiffel.

Anish Kapoor with a scale model of his ArcelorMittal Orbit.

Kapoor’s newer work includes his first paintings in years, though they stretch the description of a painting somewhat. There's paint, of course, but also silicon, and white resin applied deep and wide on canvas. Some of the paintings project as much as two feet from the gallery wall. These creations hang precariously, their apparent weight seemingly defying gravity itself. The initial impression is, as others have noted, that of a three-dimensional Francis Bacon, though Kapoor's works have a more savage quality. It’s pretty hard not to think of slabs of meat, with the sinews, bone, gore and eviscerated flesh both shocking yet, in the painting's hidden depths, truly mesmerizing. Are they his reflection on a particularly barbaric moment in our contemporary history? The artist contends, "I'm not going to exclude it. But I’m not going illustrate it either. I’m not a journalist. I don’t want to have anything to say, it just gets in the way. I think the journey of an artist is a journey of discovery and some engagements with paint, with the nature of material, and bodily things."

Kapoor views an artist’s job as going into the studio saying, "I don’t know what to do, I’m lost."



I don't know what it is, but I'd certainly hate to meet
up with it in a dark alley.
(Actually, it's called Trumpet.)

 

Top Ten Christmas Paintings

10. Kitten Christmas, 2010, Carol Chretien.
High marks for originality, lower marks for Christmas relevance. That's why it's number ten on the list.

I started off intending to present the top ten Christmas paintings of this year, 2016 but then was reminded of a fact I'd known for quite sometime--artists and critics care little for dates when dealing with contemporary art. I mean, who cares if a painting was done in 2014 or 2016, right? Thus, I've had to settle for presenting the top ten recent Christmas paintings. That would suggest that I'm at least talking about works done in this century, which sounds a bit grandiose. My guess is that all these seen here (with one exception) were done in the past five years, which seems a reasonable time frame.

 

9. Fractal Christmas, Omron. High marks for originality as well as abstract Christmas spirit and color. Low marks for a total lack of a Christmas narrative. I know, This stretches the definition of painting, but in the 21st-century, that's a positive factor.

Having disposed of that matter, some may wonder how I'm such an expert on Christmas painting to be both judge and jury in selecting a top ten listing. I've painted about a dozen such works over the years. One of them, He's Making a List (bottom) dates from as far back as 1971, though it wasn't my first such effort. I know, that doesn't sound like many but it's somewhat more than most painters. Beyond that, as a high school art instructor, I spent twenty-six years evaluating student art. With a set of explicit criteria, it's not easy, but quite doable. That brings us to the criteria. I've place a high emphasis on originality of concept. That's extremely important in that such originality is quite difficult to achieve in a genre that has been so overworked in the past. It's difficult to eliminate Santa, Christmas decorations, sleigh rides, playing children, snowmen, and a dozen more iconic elements so common in such paintings, but I've made the effort, or at least demanded a fresh approach in dealing with such content.

 

8. Boy and Dog with a Christmas Tree, unknown artist. A bit trite, but substituting a boy instead of a father and kids hauling the tree through the snow on his little red wagon counts for something.

 

 

And finally, I've made every effort to choose paintings with a direct reference to Christmas. A winter snow scene, even with warm lighted, Thomas-Kinkade-type cottages, and gift-laden kinfolk does not equate to Christmas, just as the songs Sleigh Ride, Winter Wonderland, Baby, It's Cold Outside, Let It Snow, or even Jingle Bells, have nothing to do with Christmas. I'm well aware that selections number 10 (top) and number 9 are weak in this regard, but that's why they're at the bottom of the list. When possible, I've included the actual title and artist of the paintings.



7. Christmas Eve Walk, Russell Cobane. Christmas Eve
or not, a dog has certain..."needs."

Christmas paintings are rife with suburban street scenes of snow and Victorian homes alive with warm, amber windows. I've not included any such works simply because they're so common and often amount to little more than pretty pictures rather than involving the human element with Christmas overtones such as Christmas Eve Walk (above), by Russell Cobane. At least he didn't show the dog demonstrating the need for such a yuletide outing. Okay, this one is pretty, but not syrupy sweet.

6. Christmas in Washington, Paul McGehee. This one rates high for originality, despite the iconic content.

Christmas in Washington (above), is a worthy Christmas scene, yet it does have some problems. In observing the carolers' clothes, they would appear to be from the 19th century. However, the electric Christmas tree lights didn't appear on exterior White House trees until sometime after 1900. Also, the White House is depicted with the Truman Balcony, which dates back only as far as the 1950s. Santa's outfit is a bit too 20th-century as well. This painting is, in fact, burdened with several other anachronisms.

5. Adoration of the Magi, Marcello Corti.

Marcello Corti's Adoration of the Magi (above) comes in fifth on the list for its relatively original composition, color, and approach to a biblical scene about as shopworn as they come. I like the fact that the number of magi appears to be rather ambiguous, just as is the Bible. This is the first of two scenes by Corti on the list. This artist has painted dozens, perhaps hundreds of Christmas oriented works, many with a surprising degree of originality.

4. Little Girl Looking Downstairs At Christmas Party,
Norman Rockwell.

What would a list of Christmas paintings be without a Norman Rockwell? This is not, obviously, a recent work by a living artist, and it's just as obviously dated in appearance (probably from the early 1950s). However, as compared to other Christmas art, both now and then, its concept displays an originality in in thinking and approach which sets it apart from even most of Rockwell's many other Christmas works. It's often said that Christmas is for and about children. Rockwell deftly pokes fun at this hypocrisy.

3. Saint Nicholas Feeds the Horses, unknown artist.

By far, Saint Nicholas Feeds the Horses (above) is the most

beautiful of all the paintings on the list. It's also quite an original, little-used image. Notice, we're not depicting Santa Claus here but his original incarnation as a Catholic saint imbued with the highest ideals of Christmas love and giving.

2. Memories At Rockefeller, Robert Finale



The extremes between my number 2 choice (above) and number 3, were such that I debated long and hard between the two rankings. St. Nicholas is the epitome of the selfless Christmas spirit while the opulent extravagance of New York City's Rockefeller Center Plaza is just the opposite. The latter is Christmas NOW, the former is Christmas THEN. Which is the better depiction of Christmas?

1. Nativity, Marcello Corti

Of course the number one Christmas painting on the list would have to be a nativity. This one is also by Marcello Corti, seemingly the number one authority on the subject. There would be no Christmas without this iconic scene painted by (it would seem) just about every painter on earth. Because of that, and the fact that this scene centers on Joseph, rather than the traditional mother of Christ, I chose it as number one. The couple look holy, yet con-temporary. Also, the painting style is looser, more painterly, than most such scenes.

Copyright, Jim Lane

He's Making a List, 1971, Jim Lane.
You mean Santa doesn't use a
Christmas catalog?

I'm sure no one will agree completely with my ranking order. Some might even did-pute the inclusion of certain works. That's good. That means you're employing the gift of critical thinking. That might, arguably, be a gift from God to mankind second only to his son, who was almost certainly not born on Christ-mas Day.