August 31, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Grid Technique
Alberti perhaps can be called the first
person who actively and consciously conceived of applying mathematics to art,
even though he was primarily an artist and secondly an amateur mathematician
and dabbled in it lightly.
In his 1435 book ‘De picture’ (On Painting)
he made it clear that he considered mathematics a common ground that could be
applied both to sciences as well as art and wrote:
“To make clear my exposition in writing
this brief commentary on painting, I will take first from the mathematicians
those things with which my subject is concerned.”
Over and above this Alberti was a firm
believer that art must mimic nature not in that very objective sense but in the
sense that the artist must be able to capture all the beauty of the nature that
he has drawn into his painting.
This is how he puts it, “through by
different skills, at the same goal, namely that as nearly as possible the work
they have undertaken shall appear to the observer to be similar to the real
objects of nature.”
Regarding beauty he says that, “beauty is
the harmony of all parts in relation to one another”, and “this concord is
realized in a particular number, proportion, and arrangement demanded by
harmony.”
Now let us return to the grid technique of painting.
Now what is this grid technique?
It is not a very complicated device to
paint upon.
All that is required for this technique is a large wooden frame or any kind of square
frame with fine grid wiring of small squares (not too small though) running
through it.
You need to place this grid (which is
transparent) in front of you and view he scenery or the object of your interest
through it.
Now this grid allows you to get a very
accurate sense of the relative proportions of various objects that could be
lying at variable distance from your eyes.
This gave the artist the pyramid or cone to
be more accurate of all light rays emanating from each and every object entering
the grid that was described by Ibn al-Haytham in 1000 AD as:
“from each point of every colored body,
illuminated by any light, issue light and color along every straight line that
can be drawn from that point” in his ‘Book of Optics’.
Keeping this transparent grid next to your mounted
canvas, oil and pastels with perhaps faint grid lines of same proportions hand drawn
on the canvas at a prior moment such that the transparent grid covered your
scenery of interest allowed you to replicate the same on your canvas.
This was a near-perfect technique of
copying a scene square by square keeping everything in proportion and thereby
conveying the sense of linear perspective that is a natural fall out of such
kind of imagery construction.
It does not even require any direct
application of mathematics of linear perspective in the image construction.
This was almost the perfect way of copying
or capturing any kind of scenery or human image.
But then, this left no room for any kind of
creativity on your canvas.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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