मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Did painting originate from copying a shadow?

Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, "The Visual World of Shadows":

“…Shadows are a ubiquitous feature of our visual environment, in which so many objects block the light that is our principal source of information. Given their perturbation of light, and their high contrast, shadows are a massive problem for vision which must distinguish them from full-blown objects or material features of objects. Despite their nuisance, shadows are also an invaluable resource as their dance with light and their visibility can signal objects’ presence, location, shape, and size, among other properties. We know that much of the information from shadows is processed automatically and then may be accessed consciously, on demand, as it were. What is intriguing is that once used, shadows end up in the visual dustbin—they are hardly noticed or remembered—from where they can be retrieved only in certain special circumstances. Try to recall the shadows in the room you just left. Now go back there and look at all of them; you will see that most of them went unnoticed.

Because of the realism they offer and because of their visual and conceptual complexity, shadows have long fascinated visual artists: painters, graphic designers, movie makers…”

 

Gyges of Lydia inventing the art of drawing by tracing his shadow, 1573 as painted by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574)

"...In Vasari’s The Origins of Painting, the light source is in a position such that it could not possibly cast the shadow of the painter’s profile on the wall. Actually, no light source is positioned anywhere in the scene that can possibly cast that very shadow, as the painter’s profile exactly matches the shadow’s outline. (Sure enough, the real shadow from that position would have been a poor portrait of the painter.) Observe that the painter’s face is in the shade, which means that his profile is definitely not casting his shadow as depicted. Nevertheless, the shadow seems appropriate at first glance..."

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