Anatomy and Art

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The video was only just presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week, and has not yet been peer reviewed for publication.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)

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon the work of Michael Reedy.  He’s really doing some incredible work.  This is an example from his anatomy series here.

His other work shows off his mastery of the human form in all of it’s levels just as well or even more effectively though.

I’m just so impressed.  This guy has figured out light and shadow, anatomy, and how the human form moves and bends.  Plus his overall compositions are just plain interesting.  I’m really pleased to have found his work.

Hey, look what came in the mail today…

They even included a shiny red ribbon in the package too.

For all of my thought and study into likenesses and human form, this guy is doing it with Rubik’s cubes.  Seriously.  This is one piece of modern art, I will not mock.  I don’t have it in me to make something like that, and it’s crazy neat.

You can read more about the project here from the artist’s own site http://petefecteau.com/

I recently finished up one of my old little skulls.  I still haven’t started reproducing any of these little guys yet, but a buyer contacted me not long ago for the originals I have around so far, so that’s encouraging to get back into it.  I wound up baking this last one completely black, but that just makes it strong.  Hopefully I haven’t lost too much detail in the coloring.  I think that getting back to these is really good practice for me while I’m out of the clinic.  Working in polymer clay is very different than working in wax, but I think that any kind of working in shape and form like this is good practice for me.

Gonna polish this little guy up a touch with some denim or something and I’ve got a bundle of skulls to send off to someone 🙂

So, it’s no secret really that I’ve got some love for Vincent Van Gogh.  And even though he wasn’t an anatomical artist or medical artist, he did study to improve his grasp of the human figure at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussles for a little while.  As far as I know, this is the closest thing to an anatomical art piece that he ever painted.  So today I thought that I’d like to post that here.

It’s kind of fantastic in it’s balance between simplicity and complexity.  I wouldn’t study anatomy from it, but it’s clear that he was looking at bones to do this and not just making something up.  The cigarette is maybe a little silly, though a lot of years have passed between the time he did this and everything else that might make me feel that way about it.  And you really do get the sense of a burning ember at the tip of that thing.  It’s a neat painting.