instagram: @numb.teeth

[image description:

Two photos showing parts of a painting of many pastel flowers. They’re painted using thick strokes that give each petal a raised texture.

End description.]

rebelle/rebelle pro which is a more traditionally-inclined painting program that usually costs like 150 bucks is now uhhh 10 fucking dollars? until october 13th

#wait is it a subscription or a 1 time buy?

you can click the details dropdown on each product for more info but yeah it’s a one-time buy :)

Oh??

Ooooooh??!

Ooohoohoohooo!

Vanessa Stockard – Kevin series.

KEVIN!!!!

Shögun Defeated

BOY (2010) dir. Taika Waititi

David Ambarzumjan’s “Brushstrokes in Time” at Beinart Gallery.

Currently on view at Beinart Gallery in Brunswick, Australia is artist David Ambarzumjan’s solo exhibition “Brushstrokes in Time.”

With these new works, Ambarzumjan wanted to turn his focus away from urban scenes and towards natural landscapes, while still highlighting our influence on them, whether in the past, present or future. As with previous works in the series, he wanted to emphasise how diverse and unpredictable life is and how we can find parallels in the wildest differences.

Ambarzumjan was also excited to experiment more with whimsical elements and surreal compositions with bigger and bolder, textural brush strokes, conveying a sense of movement in the work. To make these contrasting scenes coexist in one single composition, he tried to find similarities between them, bridges that would connect light and darkness, life and death, warmth and coldness, creating a space where extremes can meet and intersect without the control of time.

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where is that renaissance painting with those two fellers and a giant fucking random skull on the floor that looks like it was accidentally stretched out in photoshop

THANK YOU

somebody please explain

Someone once told me it’s like that because it was designed to be hung in a stairwell so the skull pops out as you walk past.

…I guess it works but you have to be at a pretty sharp angle

There was a whole trend at one point where artists would include something in their paintings (usually a skull, for whatever reason) that’s super distorted in just the right way so that it looks normal if you hold the painting up to a convex/concave mirror. I have absolutely no idea why. But I think that’s what’s going on here.

In case anyone’s curious, here’s what it looks like when you walk past it irl:

It does have a 3D effect to it! It’s pretty neat, guess it would be even more impressive to people from the 14th century.

honestly, people just looking at the skull are missing the real deal here

You can read any implied text you see in this thing, even the book, that’s how detailed it is. Look at the painting on those letters!

jesus christ you’re just showing off now, Hans!

HANS OH MY GOD

anyway, the skull apparently had some meaning about the transcendence of death, you can only see it clearly when you can’t see the world clearly and vice versa, but man, I’m all about the detail in this guy’s shit

No, I think you’re missing the real deal here

as an art historian, i think this is the best post on tumblr

i’m obsessed with this painting called tomato king and i’m even more obsessed with the man who drew it. his name is stuart dunkel and he is a classical oboeist and he also paints tiny little oil paintings of mice living their best lives. he looks like this.

HELL YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is this the jelly bean guy???

@raevenlywrites the WHO???

The guy who does the mice with jelly beans

And dreidels, apparently

William Bruce Ellis Ranken (1881-1941) - The florist. 1930.

William Trost Richards (1833-1905)

Summer Sea, 1897

Caravaggio living paintings by Ludovica Rambelli Theater

This never ceases to amaze me, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

Thomas Blackshear II, Paintings.

Masterpieces from revered artist Thomas Blackshear II who lives and works in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

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She is, 2018, Acrylic on paper

Matthew Cusick (b.1970) - Rose Wave. 2017. Inlaid maps, acrylic on panel.

a couple paintings/rain studies I did

.............paintings????????

I never did post this by itself after doing revisions....here it is two years later lol happy easter!

where is that renaissance painting with those two fellers and a giant fucking random skull on the floor that looks like it was accidentally stretched out in photoshop

THANK YOU

somebody please explain

Someone once told me it’s like that because it was designed to be hung in a stairwell so the skull pops out as you walk past.

…I guess it works but you have to be at a pretty sharp angle

There was a whole trend at one point where artists would include something in their paintings (usually a skull, for whatever reason) that’s super distorted in just the right way so that it looks normal if you hold the painting up to a convex/concave mirror. I have absolutely no idea why. But I think that’s what’s going on here.

In case anyone’s curious, here’s what it looks like when you walk past it irl:

It does have a 3D effect to it! It’s pretty neat, guess it would be even more impressive to people from the 14th century.

ahhhhh it’s my favourite painting on my dash!! strap in folks it’s nerd commentary time!!

so there’s like a billion and one things going on in this painting (because it’s the middle of the renaissance and they got a li’l excited) so let’s break this down.

first off, it was painted smack dab in the middle of the renaissance (1533) which means people-with-money are interested in two primary things:

this is important and will explain 90% of everything going on (the remaining 10% is just the painter showing off).

okay, so first off it’s called ambassadors because on either side we have a)a stately, educated man of the world, and b)a religious figure head. who precisely they were was up for debate for like 300 hundred years and isn’t really the point. what is the point is that one of them represents the best of man, and the other the best from God; they therefore are ambassadors of these two facets, and to prove their excellence, we have all the items on the shelves.

on the top shelf we’ve got a celestial globe, a sundial, a quadrant, a torquetum, etc. these are all things focused on learning the up there, the things beyond this world but yet are still scientific that humans are categorizing.

meanwhile on the bottom shelf, we’ve got the awesome things of human learning on earth: a terrestrial globe, a book of mathematics for merchants, a lute, hymnal, etc.

the point of having all these things is to show off the glory of human excellence when it comes to learning and also the artist’s ability to paint details. you’ve got the full trivium of learning going on: grammar, logic, rhetoric; and then also the quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. everything is balanced.

H O W E V E R.

holbein is also problematizing human learning even as he’s extolling its virtues. for example, we have a broken string on the lute:

the instrument settings on the polyhedral sundial are actually wrong:

and, most importantly, that mother effing skull.

so the skull represents a couple things.

first, perspective was all 👏 the 👏  rage 👏  during the renaissance, and the better you were at it, the higher respect you got. so if you could draw something like this (which a previous commenter is correct, it was hung by a staircase so you would see it as you passed by), you automatically got that sweet sweet street cred. also if you don’t think it’s impressive that he could paint this by hand, you try it because dear lord it’s not fun pls pls professor let us go back to normal still lifes we’ll never complain about onion skins and tomatoes ever again aaaaaugh—

um so second, this is a form of memento mori, or vanitas, meaning “remember you must die” and “vanity” (a reference to ecclesiastes), respectively. the point of painting these was to remind the owner that they are mortal, and that time is short — and that no matter how much human knowledge they accumulated (the shelves), nothing could stop death.

side note: the placement of the skull is also important. the skull is a reference to death, the end of life, so it’s placed on the floor. compare this to michelangelo’s creation of adam, which is a reference to the beginning of life, and is placed on the sistine chapel’s ceiling. 

for life you look up, for death you look down.

AND BECAUSE OF THAT, we get to the last thing this painting is hiding:

a crucifix, tucked away in the top left corner so that you can barely see it, but once you do, you can’t unsee it. because, once again, this is the middle of the renaissance: holbein wants to stress both the importance of human knowledge (plato’s know thyself), and its limits (calvin’s ‘man never has clear knowledge of self until he has seen God’s face’). remember knowledge, remember death, remember christ.

and remember how good of a painter he is he needs more patrons.

anyway i could wax poetic about this painting for literal hours (the one and only time i saw it in person i wound up explicating to random viewers bc i can’t help myself and y’know they were receptive), so yeah. there’s the cliff notes version.

How many of you just tilted your computer to make the skull appear?

Man that didn’t occur to me but I did and it was great.

Omg, this does work on mobile too 😱😱😱

You just have to look at the picture from a really, really sharp angle!!!😱😱