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"Inflammable"
Art Tutoring – 10 tips for supporting your art career by teaching art…
The income of a professional visual artist can be a roller-coaster ride of financial highs and lows, and knowing this, many artists naturally turn to teaching art in order to bring in some bread and butter income. Here’s a few tips!
1. Become an art tutor because you genuinely want to share your love of art.
Magazine Markets: Medical and Science Illustrators
Many trade magazines need scientific illustrators from time to time. Children’s magazines like Highlights for Children (www.highlights.com), Cricket, Muse, and others (www.cricketmag.com), regularly print science articles. Natural History (www.naturalhistorymag.com), Scientific American (www.sciam.com), National Geographic (www.nationalgeographic.com), Discover (www.discover.com), and Smithsonian magazine (www.smithsonianmag.si.edu) also use natural science illustrators.
When you see published illustrations you wish you would have done, explore the magazine’s website and see what their procedure is for reviewing an artist’s work. Many art directors these days are quite happy to be referred to the gallery of a nice web site for present or future reference.
Math and Art; What We Can Learn From Escher
“Maurits Cornelis Escher, was born in Leeuwarden, Holland in 1898. He created unique and fascinating works of art that explore and exhibit a wide range of mathematical ideas.
While he was still in school his family planned for him to follow his father's career of architecture, but poor grades and an aptitude for drawing and design eventually led him to a career in the graphic arts. His work went almost unnoticed until the 1950’s, but by 1956 he had given his first important exhibition, was written up in Time magazine, and acquired a world-wide reputation. Among his greatest admirers were mathematicians, who recognized in his work an extraordinary visualization of mathematical principles. This was the more remarkable in that Escher had no formal mathematics training beyond secondary school.
As his work developed, he drew great inspiration from the mathematical ideas he read about, often working directly from structures in plane and projective geometry, and eventually capturing the essence of non-Euclidean geometries, as we will see below. He was also fascinated with paradox and "impossible" figures, and used an idea of Roger Penrose’s to develop many intriguing works of art. Thus, for the student of mathematics, Escher’s work encompasses two broad areas: the geometry of space, and what we may call the logic of space.
THE LOGIC OF SPACE
By the “logic” of space we mean those spatial relations among physical objects which are necessary, and which when violated result in visual paradoxes, sometimes called optical illusions. All artists are concerned with the logic of space, and many have explored its rules quite deliberately. Picasso, for instance.
Escher understood that the geometry of space determines its logic, and likewise the logic of space often determines its geometry. One of the features of the logic of space which he often applied is the play of light and shadow on concave and convex objects. In the lithograph Cube with Ribbons, the bumps on the bands are our visual clue to how they are intertwined with the cube. However, if we are to believe our eyes, then we cannot believe the ribbons!
Another of Escher's chief concerns was with perspective. In any perspective drawing,
vanishing points are chosen which represent for the eye the point(s) at inifinity. It was the study of perspective and “points at infinity” by Alberti, Desargues, and others during the renaissance that led directly to the modern field of projective geometry.
By introducing unusual vanishing points and forcing elements of a composition to obey them, Escher was able to render scenes in which the “up/down” and “left/right” orientations of its elements shift, depending on how the viewer’s eye takes it in. In his perspective study for High and Low, the artist has placed five vanishing points: top left and right, bottom left and right, and center. The result is that in the bottom half of the composition the viewer is looking up, but in the top half he or she is looking down. To emphasize what he has accomplished, Escher has made the top and bottom halves depictions of the same composition.
A third type of “impossible drawing” relies on the brain's insistence upon using visual clues to construct a three-dimensional object from a two-dimensional representation, and Escher created many works which address this type of anomaly.
One of the most intriguing is based on an idea of the mathematician Roger Penrose’s – the impossible triangle. In this lithograph, Waterfall, two Penrose triangles have been combined into one impossible figure. One sees immediately one of the reasons the logic of space must preclude such a construction: the waterfall is a closed system, yet it turns the mill wheel continuously, like a perpetual motion machine, violating the law of conservation of energy. (Notice the intersecting cubes and octahedrons on the towers.)
Escher left to us upon his death in 1972, a wealth of information about the depth and importance of his work. Explore further the rich legacy of M.C. Escher and ponder anew the intersections he has drawn for us among the world of imagination, the world of mathematics, and the world of our waking life.”
Source: Visual Math
Eager to Learn More about MC. Escher? Visit these sites:
A peak…Maurits Cornelis Escher (17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972), usually referred to as M.C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.
"Inside Out Shell"
MATH BASED ART -- Just starting out? Here are some very helpful links:
How to use PhotoShop to Create Fractal Art Patterns - a Video
A Fractal Geometry Class from Yale University
Fractals and Chaos Information and Tutorials
“Chaos Theory” Explained - Math and Art
Call to Artists/ Event:
Bridges 2010
The Bridges Conferences, running annually since 1998, brings together practicing mathematicians, scientists, artists, educators, musicians, writers, computer scientists, sculptors, dancers, weavers, and model builders in a lively atmosphere of exchange and mutual encouragement. Important components of these conferences, in addition to formal presentations, are hands-on workshops, gallery displays of visual art, working sessions with artists who are crossing the mathematics-arts boundaries, and musical/theatrical events in the evenings.
In 2010, the Bridges Conference will be held in Pécs, Hungary, July 24-28. As always, the Conference will feature talks and artworks presenting the latest ideas in mathematics and the arts from experts around the world. There will be artists and artworks representing painting, drawing, sculpture, computer graphics, fiber arts, music, dance, and more. There will be hands-on workshops, special music, theater, and movie evenings, and a day-long excursion to museums and cultural sites. The language of the conference is English. All papers are refereed and the accepted papers will appear in a printed proceedings.
Exhibition this year in Hungry --
Deadline July 23, 2010 See specifications at: Exhibit Specifications
This page posted 19 April 2010
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