[HN Gopher] Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into the...
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Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
Author : benbreen
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-07-11 12:37 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| Fricken wrote:
| Many cartoonists draw themselves into their work. Bill Waterson
| looks like Calvin's dad. Jon Arbuckle is Jim Davis' alter ego.
| Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Moebius, they all draw impressions of
| themselves or alter egos into their work.
|
| Here's a picture of Herge as a young man I looked up out of
| curiosity:
|
| https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Herg%C3%A9#/media/Fichier:Gal...
|
| Does he resemble Tintin to you? I would say he totally does.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| He totally does! I grew up reading the comics and still
| consider myself a fan, thanks for teaching me something new
| about Tintin. Very cool.
| [deleted]
| jaggederest wrote:
| To expand even more broadly, many authors set their works in
| familiar circumstances, perhaps most legendarily John Steinbeck
| with Salinas and the central California coast and Stephen
| King's "Derry" (Bangor) Maine
| pengaru wrote:
| > I never let anybody look until it's finished. > Does
| it look like me? > It's not supposed to. >
| It's not? > Of course not. > Didn't anybody
| ever tell you > That the true artist > Only
| ever depicts himself? - Stealing Beauty (1996)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Not always subconsciously. Saw this today:
|
| > Durer painted himself at centre of Renaissance altarpiece in
| revenge, research finds
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jul/11/durer-p...
| DesiLurker wrote:
| Why, are you worried your Creative-diffusion-LLM-thing will start
| leaking your bitcoin wallet private keys over time?
| labster wrote:
| Don't be ridiculous. But Stable Diffusion could start
| hallucinating PII.
| DieBruderBauer wrote:
| I would be surprised if they _didn't_ paint themselves into their
| work.
|
| Example: Van Gogh _must have_ transferred his neuroses into his
| work. Without question.
| brandall10 wrote:
| Wow... currently in Amsterdam, was just at the Van Gogh Museum
| a few hours ago. The article seems to be focusing on their own
| facial features being applied to other subjects in their works,
| and by doing so giving their own visage some sort of
| immortality.
|
| Of course impressionistic art is going to filter reality by the
| internal state of the painter. That's sorta what it is by its
| very definition.
| smokel wrote:
| Stuff like this is hard to validate. For most renaissance
| artists, their self-portraits are far from photorealistic.
|
| There is also quite a big difference between painting from nature
| and by construction from the mind, which I think is important
| here. I suppose that one learns a certain template for faces,
| mostly by practice. If most of that practice is on self-portraits
| in a mirror, then, yes, the rote characters may look like that
| face as well. It would take deliberate practice to have multiple
| templates available. Any comic book artists who'd like to chime
| in here?
|
| Observing this phenomenon in contemporary artists is troublesome,
| because they are so much influenced by photography, not only by
| anatomy or live observation.
|
| An interesting contemporary artist in this context might be
| Philip Akkerman [1]. He has made over 10,000 (!) self portraits,
| nearly half of them are paintings.
|
| [1] https://philipakkerman.com/
| benbreen wrote:
| "Stuff like this is hard to validate. For most renaissance
| artists, their self-portraits are far from photorealistic."
|
| Author here. Agreed, it's definitely not a science.
|
| I suspect the author of this article I link to in the post
| might disagree though: http://www.laboratoiredanthropologieanat
| omiqueetdepaleopatho.... He is making an actual claim to
| scientific validity, complete with tables of measurements of
| the distance between Benvenuto Cellini's "lateral nasal point"
| and pupils in various potential self-portraits. I'm skeptical,
| but it's interesting to note that the author seems to know what
| he's talking about (director of a university paleopathalogy lab
| and "Expert en Anthropologie d'identification" for the French
| legal system).
| anyfoo wrote:
| I think much of what you say appears to be covered in (indeed,
| the point of) the article?
| smokel wrote:
| Haha, I still have a long way to go to make myself clear on
| an internet forum.
|
| I have thoroughly reread the article, and I think my comment
| has four original, albeit very minor, contributions, that are
| not covered in the article. Granted, the information density
| of my comment may be low. I also agree with the entire
| article, so my remarks are in line with what is said there.
| [deleted]
| weinzierl wrote:
| Sometimes they painted themselves into their work consciously and
| in revenge.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jul/11/durer-p...
| idlewords wrote:
| I know I'm always coding myself into my programs.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Ah, when you reached for immortality you selected "digital
| horcruxes of your personality scattered all across tech".
| [deleted]
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I know a painter who consciously paints himself in all his
| paintings even if as a viewer you don't notice it much, he
| basically snips features from himself and projects them onto
| other subjects in his paintings, whether they are men or women.
| But this question is perhaps too generalized, some painters do so
| while others don't. Plus that subconscious part, we're never
| going to find out.
| Strilanc wrote:
| To me it seems simpler to suppose the artist is drawing everyone
| (including themselves) in the same distorted way, as opposed to
| imposing themselves into everyone.
|
| Ideally you'd have a photo of the artist for comparison, instead
| of a self portrait. That'd remove this ambiguity. Admittedly
| that's a bit challenging for renaissance artists, but it'd be
| easy for modern artists.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Something I don't see mentioned, isn't our idea of beauty
| supposed to be heavily influenced by our immediate family? So if
| we're painting random beautiful people in the background, it
| wouldn't be surprising that they're loosely based on our family
| members who would have traits very similar to ours.
|
| Further, with something like the Sofonisba Anguissola self
| portrait, the virgin Mary being influenced by her mother would
| explain everything just as well. Even the similar hairstyle could
| be her copying her mother rather than inserting herself as Mary.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reaction: Nope! -
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/95/Warhol-...
| dirtyv wrote:
| Whenever you create any kind of art, be it a story, a picture, or
| whatever, I would argue you reveal something about yourself. I
| remember reading about Philippe Halsman, a photographer who did
| this series of portraits featuring celebrities jumping. His
| theory was that when his subjects were in the air they were so
| preoccupied that they would inadvertently let their guard down
| and let their true selves out. He did a portrait of Marilyn
| Monroe like this and afterwards when he told her his reasoning
| behind it she was so mortified she refused to ever work with him
| again
| he0001 wrote:
| As a hobby painter, I believe there's also your (in)ability or
| your "favorite" style of painting things that makes paintings
| look the same. Many of my portraits have the same style because I
| know or can paint certain things/angles/shadows more "right" than
| other. It doesn't look like me, but I do lend my own face to find
| the right thing/angle/shadow.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Re:
|
| > An AI-related proposal
|
| When Stable Diffusion came out, one of the first things I did was
| prompt it to generate some self portraits:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/GhlUnPn
| roarcher wrote:
| "Self portrait" is just another category of image to Stable
| Diffusion. It's not rendering what it thinks Stable Diffusion
| looks like, it's rendering what it thinks a typical self
| portrait looks like.
| cgio wrote:
| I was thinking along the same lines, but it would have to be
| not only a self portrait but also the reflection of the key
| elements of that self portrait into its other creations.
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