It's been a while since we watched David Hockney's Secret Knowledge in visual culture class and I just realized I never blogged about it. I remember when my father brought me to the MET for the first time when I was 12. We walked through the European paintings and I could not understand what was so great. I knew that the skill level is hard skill to achieve, but I didn't make the connection between these paintings and art that offered deep/interesting communication. As I got older, I continued to appreciate the difficulty of creating a painting with such a realistic image, but never really got into that type of painting.
I really enjoyed the Secret Knowledge and its emphasis on the technique involved with traditional European painting. I knew that people used the grid technique, I knew of perspective techniques, and I even knew of the camera obscura; but I did not know about using the camera obscura for painting. This movie stuck in my mind and I don't think I will ever forget it.
For my research in Professor Jiesemfoek's class I am part of a group that will be making a presentation on technological advances affecting the ways artists use materials. We are focusing on painting. My group members are investigating aspects of tempera, oil and polymer paints. I am investigating the way photography affected painting. I am including Hockney's research, but expanding on it and taking a slightly different perspective.
One interesting finding was that Hockney was not the first to discuss this technique and there have been numerous writings analyzing paintings by Johannes Vermeer, assuming he must have used the camera obscura.
I found another finding to be even more interesting. Louis Daguerre was a set painter for the opera in Paris and often used the camera obscura for painting. His paintings were so striking that they gained the reputation of being able to stand on their own without the theater. He soon created the diorama which became theater entertainment for Parisians in the early 1800s. The diorama included large landscape paintings, with lighting effects and I think the floor moved. Daguerre wanted the image projected by the camera obscura to be permanent so that he could create dioramas quicker. He sought out the inventor, Charles Niepce, who was also interested in making the image from the camera obscura permanent. Niepce loved lithography, but had difficulty drawing and tracing the images created by the camera obscura. So, he was also motivated to make the image from the camera obscura permanent. Niepce first made the image semi-permanent using sulpher chloride and paper and after a few years of working with chemicals he created the first photograph (below). Together Daguerre and Niepce wanted to perfect the process and commercialize it. After they started working together, Niepce died suddenly and Daguerre soon created the first Daguerreotype. He eventually got the exposure time down to a minute, as compared to the 8 hour exposure of Neipce's heliograph, or sun drawing, which is what he called the first photograph.
Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph taken with a camera obscura:
View from the Window at Le Gras. 1826
The first successful Daguerreoytpe:
L’Atelier de l'artiste. 1837 by Charles Daguerre
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