Anatomy and Art

Finally finished this last painting of 2011.  It’ll be glossed tomorrow, and I can start packing up my paints without that loose end hanging.  And I’m happy with how it turned out.

By the way, if anyone in Chicago ever wanted to buy any art from me, right before I have to pack things up is always the best time to get a deal!

Well, I know it’s been a little while since my last update.  I’ve been very busy.  And I have exciting news to share.  I’ve just signed the agreement on a new job!  I’ll be moving to Austin, Texas to work as a 3D Artist/Animator at Sapling Learning.  They create online tools for education in math and sciences, and so far everyone I’ve met over there seems just great.  These are exciting times, and I’m looking forward to getting back to Texas again.

Just wanted to wish all of my student readers out there the best of luck with their finals.  May you all find fresh coffee, good study buddies, accurate information, and great epiphanies about the topics you study!

So, this is going to have to be one of those brief posts today, but I did want to point your attention at an interesting new 3D animation out there on the human brain in orgasm.  This is neat for a number of reasons.  For one, it’s about sex, always a popular topic.  For another, it’s about brains, and lets face it, brains are awesome. People love brains almost as much as they love sex.  And lastly, the team working on this decided to start with women as their test subjects.  Health studies have long been criticized for focusing on male anatomy and often neglecting women’s health, or at best, later coming to it as an afterthought. Well, this time the data starts with the ladies.

Here is the video. And for those of you looking closely, that’s over 80 regions of the brain lighting up. The brightest yellow you see signifies the greatest use of oxygen in that area (which is how activity is being measured here). Reds signify activity but at lower levels.

The video was only just presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week, and has not yet been peer reviewed for publication.  More information on this can be found here at Time Healthland, or here at the NY Daily News, or you can go directly to the video’s initial appearance on The Visual MD’s website.

I’ve been working on this painting for a couple of months now.  It’s not something that I’ve worked on every day or anything like that.  But it is something that I keep coming back to.  I was hoping to finish it before getting into holiday travels, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.  I’ve been taking the occasional cell phone picture as it’s come along though.  Sometimes I kind of like looking at the steps a piece takes on it’s way to becoming the finished work.

I just gave it a few more hours tonight.  It’s getting closer, but it’s not the kind of piece I can rush.  Anyway, that’s just something that I’ve been working on lately.

Tonight I stumbled upon this article from the BBC about the difference in response to a painting that is perceived to be created by an esteemed painter as opposed to those perceived to be imitations or fakes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16032234

The Oxford based study scanned the brains of people viewing images of Rembrandt paintings.  Some of the paintings were authentic and some of them were imitations.  And much more pleasure was observed in the people who believed that they were viewing the work of Rembrandt himself.  According to the article,

This found that the responses to viewing an authentic old master were deeply pleasurable, likened to tasting good food or winning a bet.
This warm glow of aesthetic pleasure was absent when the viewers looked at an image they had been told was fake. Instead the brain activity was associated with strategy and planning, as though the subject was trying to work out why this was not an authentic painting.

Some of you may recall my recent post “What’s in a Frame.”  This really gets back to that whole argument for me.  In this case, the frame is the presentation of the work of a world renown established artist.  This is coming to a viewing to see one of the greats.  And I can’t claim to be above such perception changes.  I personally spent years completely unable to enjoy movies on a computer while everyone else was getting into doing just that.  I couldn’t enjoy them because to me the computer was where the unfinished footage went, so just by virtue of being on a monitor, I would be signaled to look critically and find whatever needed fixing in the footage before me.  That’s pretty good evidence right there that I’m someone who needs that cue to go ahead and enjoy too.  So maybe I should stop waving my arms around with so many rants about how art should be judged on it’s own merit and not because of the write up next to it.  I don’t know though.  I might be more inclined to own up to my own hypocrisy on that one than give up the good fight for art for art’s sake.

Rembrandt self portrait (or is it)