Tag: art

73 ka drawing

73 ka ago, humans used a chunk of pigment to draw a pattern on a rock in a South African cave. The recently discovered fragment of the rock is now considered to be the oldest known drawing in history.

the oldest art space is crowded. see also 500 ka art, art is 60 ka old, world’s oldest portrait (26 ka), oldest manuport (3 ma), oldest figurative art (44 ka)

Ancient Greece colors

Once upon a time, long before wars, natural disasters and erosion took hold of the ancient Greek statues, these ivory gems vibrated with color. Ancient Greek sculptors valued animated and pulsating depictions as much as they valued perfection and realism, and it has finally become fact that these artists utilized color in their creations. The stark white Parthenon once breathed in blues, yellows and reds, and—though it took 1000s of years for this to be solidified in art historical circles—now, scholars are finally able to display the ancient world with the same rainbow vitality it once possessed.

Laser engraving

Brontë Sisters portrait

The only known surviving portrait taken from life of sibling literary luminaries Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë has gone home. It was painted by Branwell Brontë around 1834 at the Haworth parsonage, the family’s home on the Yorkshire moors for many isolated years of their childhood. That parsonage is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum. It usually has to make do with a copy of the famous group portrait, but the original work is now being exhibited in the place where it was painted in Emily’s honor.

Art from Overfitting?

We argue that hand marks initially supplied the idea to archaic humans that a graphic mark could act as a representation, however basic it was. This was a beginning of sorts, but how could hand marks give rise to the more complex animal depictions? Hunters entering the caves with an overactive visual system will have regularly “mistaken” the natural cave features for animals. The cave walls also simulated the outdoor environment, where hunters regularly had to be able to spot their prey in camouflage. All the hunters needed to do to “complete” a depiction was to add 1 or 2 graphic marks to the suggestive natural features based on the visual imagery in their “mind’s eye.” When later humans entered the same caves and saw these, the Neanderthals may literally have “handed on” to our own species the notion that a graphic mark could act as a figurative representation. Thanks to the primed visual system of the later hunter-gatherers—and the suggestive environment of the caves—it was Homo sapiens who took the final step creating the first complex figurative representations, with all the ramifications that followed for art and culture.

Pure CSS Francine

Diana Smith creates CSS-only hand coded “paintings.” Here are the rules she sets for herself.

All elements must be typed out by hand

Only Atom text editor and Chrome Developer Tools allowed.

1000 drone show

The massive night sky measuring 120 meters high and 280 meters wide became the best canvas for the 1000 AAVs to freely form their masterpieces. The audience were amazed and applauded to the constantly changing AAV formations ranging from neon rainbows, picturesque forms of Chinese idioms and blessings, calligraphies, and the map of China.