This is from Wikipedia. I have taken similar photographs from the vantage of the Jain temple hill in Bhopal.The beauty of the picture is in the two trees “overlooking” the Long Beach-the overlooking part is the delicious quality of the picture.

Leonardo da Vinci

(Taken from the public domain paintings of Wikipedia)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Leonardo_da_Vinci_002.jpg

I have recently taken a closer look at the Last Supper . What I have not noticed earlier was the room and the supper table ,their rectangular shapes falling into amazing symmetry with each other. The supper table of a rectangular shape is entirely visible to the viewer with the diners occupying only one side of the table as though they are appearing in a tableau with each one of them figuring in the picture with their individual expressions -the collective of which is telling the whole story. The colours chosen are subdued but nevertheless add up to tell the story by a clever juxtaposition of the blue with the ochre falling neatly in the brown hues of the room.

“The Nude ” by Fransesca Goya is one of the most popular of his paintings ,supposedly of his mistress. The nude has a rare beauty in the setting of the semi-dark bedroom which has accentuated the light falling on her body . At once sensuous and deeply contemplative at the same time ,with no smile on her lips,the woman is beautiful and her figure sprawled on the bed integrates beautifully into the half light,with enough light flooding the bed .

Monet’s colours have deep shades and the effortlessness with which the colours merge into each other produces an exuberance, a kind of celebration. The parasol itself ,of an unusual green, interacts with the blue of the clouds producing an effect of stunning beauty.

(Picture from Wikipedia-public domain entries)

“Death in the Sickroom” is a painting which is highly moving -evoking very strong emotions The sorrow is meant to be underplayed by avoiding the scene of the dead .Instead the gloom comes out from the expressions of the mourners ,which is much deeper than it would have been had the sorrow focussed on the death itself.Much before death the room was a sick room ,probably in preparation for the death and it was as though the gloom had always been there .Death was a mere extension of the sick room and will continue even after death ceased to exist in the room as part of life.

There is a bit of thinking in photography ,especially in bringing about just that much light which will show things in a different perspective than what they appear usually in.Apparently the effort is towards running away from reality. How do we run away from reality ? Probably by thinking that the reality is much deeper than appears on the face of it. What if the perspective falsifies the reality and the art presents things in a perspective which only exists in the mind .Of course the obvious answer is that it does not make any difference and what you eventually see is the reality. We are not duty-bound to concern ourselves with reality as it exists and secondly having found the reality what do we do with it ? Thirdly we do not know that the reality as we see is in fact the reality that we are concerned with.

Having thought this way, I begin to think if I can find some approximations to truth while copying reality in its normal existence .For instance my figures become blurred and my background a different texture .Why do we relate to paintings more than we relate to photographs ? Probably we all believe that the figures in art should represent only the Idea and not copies of the reality .Of course at the back of our mind is the Platonic theory that art is twice removed from Reality in that it imitates reality which itself is an imitation of the Idea.

I have come across an interesting piece of freeware(http://www.fotosketcher.com) for editing your photos to bring about the effect of a painting .I have used this and found some lovely pictures have resulted out of the use without much effort.

In the following picture I have used the freeware:

Chicks from Avignon

(Cubist) painting By Picasso

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chicks-from-avignon.jpg#file

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn

..”is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, perhaps written to settle a bar bet or perhaps written as a challenge, but either way, it’s a complete work of fiction. It’s a piece of writing I think about a lot, and it’s one of my favorites. It’s evocative, powerful and clocking in at six words, it proves that it’s not necessary to blather on endlessly to tell a good story.The Hemingway story is an extreme example of one of my favorite types of writing — flash fiction. Flash, also known as micro, sudden, short-short, postcard, minute, quick, furious, and skinny, is a type of story that has a limited number of words (definitely under 1,000, but in many cases, under 500). Typically, it has a traditional beginning-middle-end story arc, though of course it happens in an ultra-condensed form. In my experience as someone who very rarely went beyond 500 words with pieces of fiction, I found that I’d often run into people (usually other writers) with the opinion that short-short fiction is okay, but it’s not the real thing, and I think that is an unfair way of looking at flash. Though I definitely make no claims of genius, I absolutely believe that when done by a master, it’s an incredibly fast read that lingers indefinitely. Like quick-moving shadows thrown on a late-night wall by cars passing on the street outside, it often takes a lot of thinking to understand what you think you saw, and with each analysis, its shape shifts and you find something different. Take the story “Little Things” by Raymond Carver (text here), which, at 498 words, is a brilliant example of flash fiction.”

Literary Kicks : For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.
A short story has indeed  to be short  and cannot exceed 100 words preferably . The essential literary merit of the story remains unaffected by the forced brevity . “like quick-moving shadows thrown on a late-night wall by cars passing on the street outside… with each analysis,its shape shifts and you find something different “. The beauty of the image is captivating.

Blogged with Flock

In the train I chanced upon these two little girls(siblings) playing with each other and thought I could catch them on my camera without their being aware of being clicked. They were the most natural subjects who gave me a fantastic photo-shoot opportunity.

The delightful blog “Painting small impressions” by Nancy Merkle has a number of paintings of this kind and the paintings have a kind of freshness that one could almost smell -as though they are just out of the wet paint. The autumn hillside landscape is something which I have dealt with in my photography tours, especially in the brown ,arid landscape of Karnataka. I have some nice photos of my own on the subject in my collection.

It is recommended that the blog be part of the daily r.s.s. reader as the artist has a rich collection of pretty landscape paintings and has a prolific output.

Please go here:

http://small-impressions.blogspot.com/