I have wondered about the intersection/link between the "Naturalist" and the "Artist" in men such as Audubon and Darwin (and we can put Fidelia Bridges in this category?) that was much more predominant in earlier eras. I really appreciate all these wonderful thoughts. Achieving that sort of truth is quite different what we would think of as photographic copying, and I think trying to recapture the mindset at its philosophical foundations is the first step to understanding these early works, much less trying to replicate them. Illustrations for bird books are a modern form of this kind of idealism. It's not something you can entirely see on your retinas. Durand also speaks in spiritual terms, and regards a nature study as almost like a page from a Divine book, or what he called a "transcript of Nature."įrom a philosophical point of view, Durand was a Transcendentalist or a Platonic idealist, so his idea was that truth is something beyond the veil of appearances, more what we would think of as the perfect type of a given plant or cloud or rock formation. Durand says that an exact reproduction of nature's infinite detail is impossible - one can't capture every leaf, so he talks about "representing" the patterns of growth and the botanical detail in the terms possible in paint. It's interesting to read both Ruskin and A.B. Tom and Sesco, you both raise some wonderful questions about "truth to nature." I suppose the term is a sort of shorthand for what these artists were after. Dinotopia / World Beneath Podcast, Episode 14.Speed Chapter 6: "Academic and Conventional".The Backgrounds of "Ghost in the Shell".
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