Art I - Distortion and Caricature

Art I Anamorphic Projec1ons, Distor1ons and Distor1on Grids, and Caricatures Later in the year (precisely when is s1ll to be determined) we will be working with a couple of big genres and ideas in the visual arts: portraiture and perspec1ve. At first thought, you might not see a lot of connec1ons between those two kinds, or aspects, of art. Well, here is a liHle project (or, more accurately, a couple of op1ons you may choose between) that will help you to find some ways in which perspec1ve and portraiture can relate. Caricature is a par1cular kind of portraiture: it relies upon exaggera1on. Ar1sts who create realis1c portraits are oJen very good at observa1onal drawing: drawing what they see in front of them. However, many ar1sts who have excellent observa1onal drawing skills s1ll struggle to capture “likenesses” of their subjects. On the other hand, ar1sts who are good at caricatures seem to have an uncanny knack for capturing the essence of a person. Part of the trick, almost certainly, is that the caricaturist has a strong sense of what an “average” person looks like: they’ve developed mental models of the typical nose, mouth, and so forth, and of the usual rela1onships between these features. When they size up a poten1al subject, they quickly note various ways in which the person’s features (and the overall form of his/her face) differ from the typical and the average. They then exaggerate these differences from the norm. For example, Jay Leno has got an unusually long chin: caricaturists pick up on this unusual feature and draw his chin as being even longer than it is. Before going any further, let’s look at some photos of people who became famous, and compare those photos with caricatures that exaggerate some of their unique features. Try to iden1fy some of the specific features that are being exaggerated. In many cases, the ar1st has played with not just the shape and size of a specific feature, but, as noted above, with the rela1onship between certain features, as in how far apart eyes are spaced, for example, or how much space there is between the boHom of the nose and the upper lip. In the 1950s, the crime photographer known as Weegee decided to branch out, and he began to make distorted photos of various celebri1es. In the next several slides, you’ll see various examples of these strange portrait photos, which are Weegee’s aHempt to make caricatures with a camera. Alongside each of them, you’ll also find a straigh\orward photographic portrait of the subject, as well as a more tradi1onally drawn caricature of them. And here’s a picture Weegee took of a clown, funhouse-­‐mirror style. Weegee used various specialized mirror devices to make his photographs, while the caricature ar1sts mainly used their own observa1onal skills and the knack referred to above, for ge^ng a sense of what is most dis1nc1ve about a person’s face and exaggera1ng it. There’s at least one other approach to take, though. That involves the use of a distor1on grid. A distor1on grid can change and distort the “normal” shape of an object or an animal or person (or a place). If you take a photograph of someone, for example, and superimpose a grid on it (as if you placed a transparent plas1c sheet over the photo, and this transparency had a grid on it, such as a piece of graph paper has), and if you then redraw that grid but change its shape – and if you then redraw the object from the photo to fit the new grid – you will have distorted the image of the person. In effect, you’ll do something like what Weegee did with his mechanical devices (mirrors, etc.) On the following slides you’ll see several examples of this sort of distor1on grid. The kinds of distor1on grids shown in the previous two slides are related to another kind of distor1on called anamorphic projec1on. In this type of visual representa1on, we see objects so distorted that we may barely recognize them. But, if we look at the picture from just the right angle, the object will look normal again. This type of picture is related to perspec1ve: an anamorphic projec1on is basically a view of an object from a very steep angle, and it is “realis1c” when viewed from the same angle as the original viewing angle. In the next slide, you’ll see an example from a very well-­‐known pain1ng by the ar1st Hans Holbein: it’s called The Ambassadors. In the lower half of the pain1ng, you’ll see a skull shown in anamorphic projec1on; an addi1onal view shows how the skull would look if you view the pain1ng from a very close and sharp angle. You’ll no1ce that, when the skull is shown undistorted, the other stuff in the pain1ng actually becomes distorted! It’s as though the ar1st has shown everything else from one point of view, and the skull from an en1rely different, and extreme/unusual, point of view. Assignment: Op1on 1: Choose someone fairly well-­‐known to draw: find a clear and straigh\orward portrait photo of the person (on your iPad, doing an Internet search). On the leJ half of your paper, make a carefully observed drawing of the person, concentra1ng almost en1rely on the shape, size, and placement of the features, and on the overall shape of the person’s head. As you’re looking at the photo and making the drawing, think about what aspects of the person’s face are at all unusual. Now, on the right half of your paper, redraw the face, but exaggera1ng the features that you find unusual. Again, you may be exaggera1ng the closeness or distance of one feature from another, not simply the largeness or smallness or unusual shape of specific features. If you wish, use a distor1on grid to make this caricature drawing. If you choose to use a distor1on grid, here’s what you’ll need to do. First, draw a simple grid with equally-­‐spaced units on top of your first drawing. (Do so lightly!) Then, determine which features and/or spaces you wish to make bigger in your caricature. Now, draw a grid with the same number of units on the right side of the paper, but space the lines further apart where you wish to exaggerate the size of certain features/spaces, and closer together where you want to shrink things. Finally, use both sets of grid lines as reference points to place the features in your caricature drawing. Op1on 2: If you wish, you can work with a photo of yourself or of someone else (not well known) and aHempt the drawings described again. And as above, you may choose to use a distor1on grid or you can do your exaggera1on “by eye.” Op1on 3: You may, instead, choose to draw an animal or an object from a photograph, and, again (as described above), make two drawings: one undistorted, and one distorted – either using a distor1on grid or making your distor1ons “by eye.”