Well, yes. I think part of the interest of the work is that he Kelvin thinks it's worthwhile to spend hundreds of hours making drawings look like photographs. It's an impressive amount of work for an effect that, as Sandi points out, could be accomplished much more easily with a cheap digital camera. If we look at the drawings and ask "Why?", as Sandi does, then the things have accomplished something.
Yes, a tremendous amount of work goes into these things and it takes some real skill to pull off the "fool the eye" aspect of them. Still, I think Sandi's question is a good one, and perhaps it's the one such artists invite us to ask: Is the effect worth the expenditure of time and talent? Kind if an existential question, isn't it? :)
Sandi, the point is similar to the blank canvasses and white cubes of the minimalist art of the 1960s: to erase the hand, or identifying marks of the maker, from the art. It's a kind of artistic suicide. By rendering the drawing indistinguishable from a photograph, the artist removes any evidence of himself from the work. Chuck close did this kind of drawing in the 60s. This is a continuation of the modernist tradition beginning with painters like Piet Mondrian and Walter Gropius.
Actually, this was done in the 19th century. Colormen (the name by which paint manufacturers of the day were know) ground up Egyptian mummys and used the dust to make artist's oil paint. It was a popular color with artists until the source of the pigment became known; which would seem obvious as the color was called "Mummy Brown."
“If we tend to think of babies being born and developing attitudes in the world as a result of their own experiences...”
I thought the same thing until I had children of my own, when several of the traits I thought I had picked up from specific events in my childhood surfaced in my son. It's not either Nature or Nurture, it's both.
the point is similar to the blank canvasses and white cubes of the minimalist art of the 1960s: to erase the hand, or identifying marks of the maker, from the art. It's a kind of artistic suicide. By rendering the drawing indistinguishable from a photograph, the artist removes any evidence of himself from the work. Chuck close did this kind of drawing in the 60s. This is a continuation of the modernist tradition beginning with painters like Piet Mondrian and Walter Gropius.
Actually, this was done in the 19th century. Colormen (the name by which paint manufacturers of the day were know) ground up Egyptian mummys and used the dust to make artist's oil paint. It was a popular color with artists until the source of the pigment became known; which would seem obvious as the color was called "Mummy Brown."
Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors" is another example of this; it has a distorted skull (memento mori) painted into the foreground which can be seen properly by looking through a notch in the picture's frame, if I'm not mitaken. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Holbein_the_Younger_-_The_Ambassadors_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
I thought the same thing until I had children of my own, when several of the traits I thought I had picked up from specific events in my childhood surfaced in my son. It's not either Nature or Nurture, it's both.