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What the fuck

This is absolutely fascinating. I've now been looking at Alex Colville's paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn't exist yet. Here's what I've got so far:

- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)

- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.

- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)

- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture

- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.

- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)

- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.

What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.

But Colville wasn't a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?

omf i never thought i'd find posts about alex colville on tumblr, but! he's a local artist where i'm from & i work at a library/archives and have processed a lot of documents related to his art. just wanted to give my two cents!

my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had:

iirc she was in a horrible automobile crash, as the car she was in collided with a train. i find it genuinely horrifying to look at, knowing the context, but a lot of colville's work is like that? idk he just seems to capture the feeling you get in nightmares where everything is treacle-ish and slow and inevitable.

i have midpollo brainrot 🥀

Derek the Henchman: I-I mean s-she wasn’t always around b-but *sobbing*

I'm WHEEZING

ppl in the age of cell phones: fucking up their necks

ppl in the age of books: fucking up their necks

ppl in the age of textile art: fucking up their necks

ppl in the age of picking lice: fucking up their necks

ppl in the age of cooking: fucking up their necks

in the age of keyboards: carpel tunnel

in the age of writing by hand: carpel tunnel

in the age of squeezing water out of wet clothes after cleaning them by hand: carpel tunnel

in the age of using hand-sized stone tools: carpel tunnel

#besties i am starting to think the human skeletal system might just be trash (via @cicerfics)

you are not wrong bestie

in the Pleistocene age when humankind first began to walk upright: knee problems

Me 5 seconds after my corpo mandated password change: Hey did you know mandated periodic password changes aren't considered good cybersecurity practice and in fact actually weaken password security? Just a funny little fact I thought you should know.

"ISO 27001 requires it, so our hands are tied"

It's actually ISO 27002 that had these guidelines and they removed them in 2022

where is all the art that perfectly appeals specifically to my exact tastes and desires and nobody elses

why the hell is he standing like that

my phone isn’t charging even though i plugged her innnnn dramatic ass bitch. YOUR PUSSY IS FILLED! WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT

Can you stop bouncing and moaning on it 😐 please for the love of god

i see now that i shouldn’t have made this post on tumblr. specifically.

From the US but i spell grey with an e because e just feels like a much greyer letter than a

grey with an E is dusty neutral but gray with an A is bluish and darker

it really is, huh

Omg I’ve found my people

It's because GRAY is a West Saxon word for the quality of light, while GREY is an Anglian word for everyday objects. And everyday objects are typically earthy, warmer, or more neutral.

To explain: West Saxon and Anglian are both dialects of Old English. West Saxon was the politically dominant dialect, but Anglian was the more popular spoken dialect. So a lot of Old English texts are written in West Saxon, but what we know as Middle English and Modern English descended more from Anglian because it was spoken by more people.

So grey (the Anglian word) shows up when authors are describing everyday stuff. Like in this sentence describing a grey beard from Holy Boke Gratia Dei: "The hed of Petir is a brood face with mech her on his berd and that is of grey colour be twix whit and blak."

Any Middle English text you read, you'll find Anglian grey is the word the author prefers to describe everyday things. Grey wool, grey feathers, grey stones, grey horses.

By contrast, gray (the West Saxon word) shows up when authors are describing the qualities of light.

A gleaming gray sword, a deep gray lake, a misty gray morning, cold gray marble, sad gray eyes. Like in this sentence from The Siege of Jerusalem: "They glowes of graie steel that were with gold hemmyd." More often than not, gray describes an impermanent or glimmering quality of light.

There's even an instance where a Middle English author uses both, and you can see how one spelling is more about the quality of light while the other is more about the color of the animal: "The cerkyl or the roundel off the eye ys sumtyme graye lyke the ey off a catte, sumtyme blak grey lyke the eyn off doggys."

("The circle or round of the eye is sometimes gray like the eye of a cat, sometimes black-grey like the eyes of dogs.")

The reason Americans use gray and not grey is because Noah Webster hated the English. :)

huh