It's Saturday, so you have plenty of time to explore perspective. Literally.
Pick up a few artistic tricks from the Venetian artist Caneletto, and then use them to put together your own masterpiece. Post it on your blog or your FB page. Here, I'll start:
I was particularly excited to float an elephant and a tourist or two in the ocean. That's Italian!
Speaking of Caneletto, I'd never really known about him before I started this post. I visited a few sites to see examples of his work. I was struck by the similarities between these and traditional American postcards. No wonder people collect postcards as works of art.
Since American art (in its pre-mid 20th C ascendancy period) is a (post 1981) Mt. St. Helens compared to the Everest of Italian art, it's not at all surprising that the engrained use of perspective (which was as natural to Italain art as pasta) should finf its way into the etchings of main street. "Originality" and American art are (almost) mutually exclusive terms well into the 19th century.
Posted by: Anthony | July 13, 2009 at 06:39 AM
Exactly. American hand-drawn postcards obviously have artistic origins dating back to the 15th c. Italy. I was amused by my own ah-ha moment there.
Posted by: pam | July 13, 2009 at 10:02 AM
Imagine your "a-ha" moment when you realize that MICHAEL BAY SHOULD BE SHOT.
Or perhaps sent to a film-maker's "re-education" camp for directors who can only blow things up...
If Michael Bay had been a Counter-Reformation artist, he would have been Guido Reni. Maybe.
Actually, no, because if there's one thing (and there are many more than that) which MB lacks, it's a sense of perspective...
Posted by: Anthony | July 14, 2009 at 06:18 AM