Tag: art

Samuel Morse: From Painter to Telegraph Pioneer | October 28 2025, 15:00

At the “Rzhipopisi” exhibition, a painting titled “Paris through the Eyes of Samuel Morse” was showcased. Essentially, dots and dashes—it sparked the idea for this post. Few know that Samuel Morse was actually an artist, and quite a decent one—check out a couple of his paintings attached to this post. But he was only “decent” by our standards—surrounded by many equally skilled artists, he considered himself a failure in this realm and devoted the second half of his life, 35 years, solely to the telegraph. (By the way, Hitler was also an artist, amateurishly decent, but more mediocre compared to Morse amidst his contemporaries, yet he ventured into politics). In the attached photos, there’s a painting with paintings. Its actual size is about two meters and among the paintings hanging there is even the Mona Lisa (La Joconde) by Leonardo da Vinci, which wasn’t valued back then as it is now. It mainly became famous after it was stolen from the Louvre, and then fervently searched for and found by the entire world.

By the way, Morse Code was not invented by Morse, but by Alfred Vail, his colleague—a fact Morse later repeatedly denied (while also attributing the invention of the telegraph itself to himself). In 1848, the Vail/Morse code was refined by the German Friedrich Gerke. The code, improved by Gerke, was used until new technologies came along.

(By the way, I don’t understand why it’s Morse and not Morz. He was American, and nobody ever called him Morse.)

Indeed, among people who were artists, about whom everyone has forgotten that they were artists because they remembered something else, it is worth mentioning besides Hitler, also Winston Churchill and George W. Bush Jr.

Revisiting the Sun: A New Invention in Art? | October 19 2025, 18:15

Interestingly, depicting the sun in a painting is a very recent invention. I haven’t seen a single painting in any museum where the sun is depicted above the horizon. Well, maybe with the exception of the Impressionists, Monet’s is very symbolic. In modern works, it appears more often. But in half, it’s a trace from a photograph.

Update: Turns out Aivazovsky has a lot of this. But he produced so many paintings in the studio with his students that it seems you can find any combination of little ships, waves, and sun.

Exploring the Chaos Game: Creating Fractals From Randomness | October 04 2025, 15:32

I read something interesting today. About fractals. If you take any three points that form a triangle, and then a fourth point anywhere, and subsequently throw a dice, the faces of which are assigned to the first three points. Next, you move from the current point towards the point corresponding to the result on the dice and place a new point halfway; this becomes the new current point. After many iterations, the points start to form the Sierpinski triangle – the one shown in the attached picture. Intuitively, you would think the triangle should be fully filled because it involves random movements in three directions from a randomly chosen point, but no. Moreover, it works even if the starting point is inside the future empty triangle (yes, a few points will disrupt the picture, but that’s it). If you start our experiment with five or six points instead of three, different shapes will form – see the attached picture. This graphical method is called the Chaos Game.

By the way, it may seem obvious, but in case you wondered — all the presented figures have zero area.

If you take two triangles and with a probability p move towards random vertices of the first, and with (1-p) towards random vertices of the second, you end up forming a Barnsley fern (picture №2).

I love such things because they seem like magic at first glance 🙂

(It’s a kind of problem from the same class as the synchronization of metronomes)

Celebrating Marcia Klioze at the Arts Club of Washington | October 03 2025, 22:42

Friends, I am currently at the opening of Marcia Klioze’s exhibit at the Arts Club Of Washington and I am absolutely thrilled! I am so happy for my wonderful mentor, from whom I have been learning oil painting for two and a half years. Today her solo exhibition is here, and the atmosphere is simply magical.

I am proud to be learning from her invaluable experience and learning to see the world anew. Next Tuesday is another class😉 I’ve wanted to post her works for a long time, and today I finally have the opportunity to share (I asked for permission, so it’s all official)!

Almost all works are for sale, for those who are interested, do drop by

Understanding Jerusalem Syndrome and Its Global Counterparts | October 01 2025, 16:10

Listening to Sapolsky in the background, he mentioned Jerusalem Syndrome. It’s when a deeply religious American Baptist from the southern USA, having saved money and prepared, arrives in the Holy Land and sees that Jerusalem is just another city: traffic jams, smog, noise, pickpockets, McDonald’s—everything like that. And then—an interesting feature—in all cases, the person tears up sheets, takes off their clothes, and suddenly finds themselves on the streets of Jerusalem, dressed as if in a toga, begins to preach on the streets, calling for a simpler life and all that.

A psychiatric team arrives, takes the person to the hospital for a few days, everything becomes clear, they send him back home, and he never encounters this syndrome again.

Each year in Jerusalem, about up to many dozens of cases are recorded. It’s a recognized syndrome, about which scientific articles are published.

Sapolsky says that if hotels in Jerusalem always had, for example, checkered sheets instead of white ones, which seem to “invite” one to don a toga, it would help prevent the crisis.

But amusingly, there’s a twin brother of this disorder, the Paris Syndrome, which for some reason mainly affects the Japanese. Japanese tourists come to Paris because they are attracted by the culture, language, literature, and history of France, as well as the landmarks of Paris. However, once there, they encounter difficulties such as a language barrier (surprise surprise!), differences in mentality, and disappointment from the reality of Paris not meeting their expectations.

There’s also a milder version called the “Florentine Syndrome.” This often happens during a visit to one of the 50 museums in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance. Suddenly, a visitor is overwhelmed by the depth of feeling the artist has imbued in the artwork. At this point, they acutely perceive all emotions, as if transported into the space of the image. Victims’ reactions vary up to hysteria or attempts to destroy the painting. Despite the syndrome’s relative rarity, guards in Florentine museums are specially trained on how to deal with its victims.

Overall, be careful with syndromes when you’re traveling.

PS. This image was made for me by google. In the second image, a guy in a tie tells a tearful girl 脆培, which seems just a meaningless set of characters, something like fragile culture. But when I asked ChatGPT, it told me it resembles 脱げ (nugu) — undress 🙂 if you ask Google Gemini to redo it, Google gives the same picture, where he’s also shouting 暁は, but at the same time, he has already taken off his shirt. But that’s also unclear what 暁 – it’s dawn. Generally, with Japanese, LLM is bad. I’ll leave the second image in the comments. By the way, there are several differences there, you can play a game to find ten differences. They are amusing

Classic Art with a Twist: Discovering Humor in “Рживопись” | September 16 2025, 19:12

Judging by the likes and shares, the previous collection was a hit, so here’s more! Context: Found a group on Telegram called “Pun Painting,” which was very delightful. Spent an hour during vacation using a script to download the paintings and apply their custom titles from their channel.

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Exploring Kal Gajoum’s Masterful Blend of Abstraction and Realism in Cityscapes | September 15 2025, 13:45

An interesting artist — Kal Gajoum (Canada, 1968). His works are amazing. Mostly cityscapes, but there are also a few still lifes. Judging by the number of works, Kal somehow manages to create these masterpieces almost like on a conveyor belt, yet you never feel like adding or removing anything from a single piece. For me, it’s the perfect balance of abstraction and realism. Enjoy 🙂

Creative Mashup: Exploring Telegram’s “Rzhivopis” Art Parodies | September 12 2025, 20:12

I discovered a hilariously wacky group on Telegram, “Rzhivopis.” I spent an hour on vacation using a script to download their paintings and overlay them with their custom titles from their channel. Then two more hours reviewing them all and picking out the best. Definitely subscribe, there are about 2000 paintings, I won’t post that many, but maybe next time there will be a second part of the funniest:)

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Seeing Shapes and Shadows: How Portrait Drawing Changes Our View of Faces | September 12 2025, 15:44

It’s interesting that even a little experience in drawing portraits makes one see patterns in other people’s faces that you wouldn’t think about otherwise. For example, you look at someone’s face, and some points on the face converge into an equilateral triangle. Or the shadow from the sun forms a notable pattern. Or some lines are strictly parallel or perpendicular. And at that moment, you feel like grabbing a pencil and trying to sketch it. At this point, it seems that achieving a likeness is a piece of cake.

Or you notice that a silvery dress is the darkest thing in the picture and probably needs to be depicted almost in black. With highlights, of course. This contradicts the notion that “a silvery dress is just a shiny white.”

Sometimes you look at someone’s face, reassured that the typical proportions are maintained, or, conversely, that they are not. There are also optical illusions. They are the most interesting. It’s when it seems that some point exactly divides a segment in half, but as soon as you measure, it turns out not to be the case.

It’s also interesting that our eyes deceive us about what lines are and what are not lines. Here, it would be more correct not to use the word line” but edge.”