Minimalism

https://books.google.com/books?id=oTAYAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA193

There are several simple little drawing tricks which the nurse may use to arouse the interest of her patient as she uses puzzles and catches. The oldest of these is by Hogarth and represents a soldier and his dog going through a doorway. As is seen by the diagram, it consists of three straight lines and one curved one.

— William Rush Dunton, Occupation Therapy, 1915

In the 1950s, humorist Roger Price invented “Droodles,” simple enigmatic drawings explained by their captions. Frank Zappa used one on the cover of a 1982 album:

zappa droodle cover

It’s called Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.

| Art · Humor

Words and Music

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Music_cross-rhythm,_cold_cup_of_tea.PNG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia user Tarquin points out that the natural rhythm of spoken language can be used to teach polyrhythms.

Above: The phrase “cold cup of tea,” spoken naturally, approximates a rhythm of 2 against 3.

Below: The phrase “what atrocious weather” approximates 4 against 3.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Music_cross-rhythm,_what_atrocious_weather.PNG

| Art · Language

The Grammar of Landscape

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hampton_Court_Palace_(3036985645).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1782, during a tour of Hampton Court, Hannah More encountered landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who compared his art to literary composition:

‘Now there‘ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’

From a letter to her sister, December 31, 1782.

| Art

Variations

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa_face_hybrid_image.jpg

Illusion Diffusion uses Stable Diffusion to produce illusion artwork.

The image above was produced by uploading an image of the Mona Lisa and specifying the prompt “colour photograph of an Italian city in the Renaissance” (illusion strength 1 and seed 0).

Below is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring modified with the prompt “Amsterdam canals in 17th century” (illusion strength 1.8 and seed 0).

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_with_a_pearl_earring_hybrid_image.jpg#filelinks

| Art · Technology

Practice

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

— Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows, 1970

| Art · Quotations

Some Lost Snowmen

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”

A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”

Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.

| Art · Oddities · Society