Pic o' the Day #1329- Intermission

Still coping with a major computer meltdown that took out both my desktop Mac AND the peripheral drive that I had my pictures backed up on at the same time! Fortunately I have my pics spread around, so I'm not completely image free.

Here's one that caught my eye today, a detail of a Roman era fresco at the Museo Barracco, over near the Campo dei Fiori. It's a good lesson on how to paint greenery fast, a prerequisite for painting in fresco, where the plaster is constantly drying as one paints.

First off, notice how the overall shape is roughed in with a neutral brown color that relates closely to the background color, and also sets off the greens (which in Roman times were not very vibrant.) Secondly, see how the the bush is rendered as a sphere, with the light coming from the right side, so that the deepest shadow colors fall on the left side and the brightest colors are on the upper right side. Lastly, notice how the colors are separate and distinct from each other, and that even though they don't really fall the way they would on a realistic portrayal, they give a good impression of the tree that reads dimensionally and coloristically. 

Pic o' the Day #1317- Happy Friday!

Detail of a decorative column used as a panel division in the Villa Arianna at Stabia. Very delicate and refined work.

Pic o' the Day #1301- How I do it.

I'm still slowly working my way through the backlog of photos I took on my trip last summer (I took over 10,000!), reliving each day with much pleasure. As I go through the piles of images, I color correct, straighten them, and add keywords so that I can find them later on. I use a program from Adobe called Lightroom, which has both development and organizational modes, handy when you have a lot of photos (235,867 and counting!) I also try to track down who the artist(s) might have been, the date of the art, and categorize into styles and periods. Sometimes (usually), when I'm shooting somewhere it's hard to keep track of all the info, so I try to shoot the placards in the room, or some other clue as to who, when, or why. It can be a bit of a puzzle when I get home to put it all back together, and I spend many hours on Wikipedia, Google, and Flickr connecting the dots and filling in gaps with other people's info and photos.

Tomorrow I'll talk some more about how I shoot these pics.

Another shot of the trompe l'oeil column at Oplontis with the same problem as yesterday's post; the base of the column is seen dead flat while it is sitting on a plane that is seen from an angle. So strange that they knew how to do all the parts of perspective (including how to draw the base at an angle) but didn't see the big picture of how to put all those parts together into a coherent whole. 

Pic o' the day

On the way down the coast from Naples to Pompeii, after you pass Herculaneum, you come to a town called Torre Annunziata, where you can easily walk from the Circumvesiana train stop down to the ruins at Oplontis, thought to have been the Villa of Poppaea, Nero's wife. It is a fabulous house, somewhere around 15,000 sq ft, with an olympic size pool in the side yard. It also has very fine ornamental painting throughout, and it is in very good condition, with roofs and protection for the walls, and even some lighting for dark days (which it was when we were there.) It also has nowhere near the crowds you will find at Pompeii and Herculaneum, so I highly recommend making a stop.

There are so many great aspects to this image from the oecus, or great room if you will, of the house. The peacock sitting on a ledge decorated with a nice cyma molding, the tragic theater mask, and the false vista of a two tiered colonnade stretching back into atmospheric haze. Not to mention the trompe l'oeil fluting of the columns on each side, which are done entirely with paint.