Funny orange
“She slides through the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her and I see her fingers trail across the polished steel—tip of each finger the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like the tip of a soldering iron. Color so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can’t tell which.”
—Ken Kesey, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962.
a cold moon
“There was a cold moon at the window, pouring light into the dorm like skim milk.”
—Ken Kesey, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962.
cave paintings
“In south-western France before about 25,000 to 20,000 BC animals were incised in bold outline on the walls of caves. From about 18,000 BC red, black and yellow pigments were also being used, especially for stencil impressions of hands, many of them with disturbingly mutilated fingers. Such “drawings” hardly prepare us, however, for the cave paintings. . . .
The earliest paintings in the most famous of the caves, Lascaux, seem to date from about 15,000 BC. During the following 5,000 years or so, cave painting continues with unchanging consistency, apart from slight local variations. . . . When the first examples were found at Altamira in northern Spain in 1879 most archeologists dismissed them as a hoax perpetrated by an artist friend of the caves’ owner: few were able to believe that they could be prehistoric. Subsequent discoveries, especially those at Lascaux made by accident in 1940, left no doubt that they are Paleolithic, and scientific methods of dating have now established their approximate age. Their technique has also been analyzed. The pigments were derived from natural minerals—reds, yellows and browns from ochre and hematite; black, dark brown and violet from various types of manganese. These substances were ground to powder and applied directly on to the damp limestone walls and ceilings of the caves. First the outlines were painted with pads of fur or mosss, with primitive brushes of fur, feather or chewed stick, or simply with a finger, and then the outlines were filled in by spraying powders thorugh bone tubes. (Such tubes with traces of colour have been found in the caves.)”
—Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.
the largest work of art in the world
“Symbols of such a size that their imagery can be recognized only when seen from far above were created in . . . widely separated parts of America. In the north, between about 500 BC and AD 500, earthworks called “effigy mounds” were raised in the form of snakes and birds, presumably as ceremonial centres for the wandering tribes who lived by hunting and gathering on the great plains. . . . In southern Peru . . . the barren plateau between the Palpa and Ingenio rivers was used as a field for a gigantic network of inflexibly straight lines many miles long, zigzags and “drawings” of animals made by removing surface stones to expose the yellow soil—the largest work of art in the world. The lines . . . [transform] an area of several hundred square miles into a temple without walls, an architecture of two-dimensional space, of diagram and relation rather than mass.”
—Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.
imaginary architecture
“The illusionism of the architectural framework in which it is set is characteristic of painting in Italy at [the Hellenistic and Roman] period. Ambitious—spatial and not flat—decorative schemes appeared early in the first century BC, visually enlarging the space of rooms with columns, entablatures and other architectural elements. . . . Later, a further step was taken by visually opening the wall, sometimes completely, sometimes with make-believe windows, to disclose vistas of colonnades stretching into the far distance. In the first century AD this imaginary architecture was treated with increasing fantasy to conjure up buildings of a more insubstantial elegance than any that could be erected on earth. . . .
These various types of painting are usually categorized as the Pompeiian Syles I, II, III and IV . . . [because] by far the largest number of examples have survived there. One room in the house of evidently prosperous merchants combines all four illusionistic systems or styles—a dado of simulated panels of rare marbles; pictures hung on or set in the wall and surrounded by frames which seem to project forwards; windows opening on to views of airy structures; and, above, statues placed on top of the wall, beyond which fanciful buildings may be glimpsed in space.”
—Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.
Isral Duke
Graphic design by Isral Duke, from a graphic design course called Color. Isral earned an “A” for his careful cropping and the compelling expressionistic color treatment of this piece, created from a black-and-white half-tone of the interior of the Parthenon.
The Pantheon
“The Pantheon was built under Trajan’s successor, the Emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138), on the site of an earlier temple, which had been of an entirely different design but similarly dedicated to all the gods. . . . One passes from a world of hard confining angular forms into one of spherical infinity, which seems almost to have been created by the column of light pouring through the circular eye or oculus of the dome and slowly, yet perceptibly, moving round the building with the diurnal motion of the earth. . . .
The interior is substantially intact. The various types of marble, mainly imported from the eastern Mediterranean and used for the pattern of squares and circles on the pavement, for the columns and the sheathing of the walls—white veined with blue and purple (pavonazzo), yellowish-orange (giallo antico), porphyry and so on—still reflect and colour the light which fills the whole building.”
—Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982.
Trajan’s Column
“If triumphal arches were conceived as historical statements, so, too, were the tall commemorative columns set up in Rome—another and even more peculiar Roman invention than the triumphal arch. The first was Trajan’s Column, entirely covered by a marble band of figurative carving winding up its shaft and originaly topped by a gilded statue of the emperor (replaced in 1588 by a statue of St Peter). It commemorated his campaigns in Dacia (present-day Romania) in AD 101 and 105–6, the main events of which are depicted in chronological sequence from bottom to top. As the column originally stood between two libraries founded by Trajan, it has been suggested that the cylindrical helix of the carving was inspired by the scrolls on which all books were then written. To read this figurative history from end to end, however, was not as simple a matter as unrolling a parchment scroll. The reader must walk round the column no less than 23 times with eyes straining ever further upwards! The scale increases slightly towards the top, but the upper registers are hard to see and impossible to appreciate and must always have been so, even when the figures were picked out in bright colors and gilding.”
—Hugh Honour & John Fleming, from The Visual Arts: A History, 1982. Everybody’s a critic.
the Book of Kells
Incarnation Initial from the Book of Kells, early 9th century.
the very shrine of art
“Examine it carefully and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies so delicate and subtle, so concise and compact, so full of knots and lines, with colours so fresh and vivid, that you might think all this was the work of an angel, not a man.”
—Giraldus de Barri, twelfth century, on one of the great Celtic manuscripts, perhaps the Book of Kells.