OK, I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for well done “morphing”, in which one image is gradually changed until it blends with and evolves into another. I also love the intersection of classical art and modern computer tech (as in these animations of da Vinci’s drawings), and as both as both an artist and a male human being, I love to look at the faces of beautiful women, so I really enjoy this beautifully done morphing excursion through a history of women’s faces in paintings.
From Medieval frescos to Picasso, numerous painted images of women’s faces, most of them strikingly beautiful both as women’s faces and as paintings, blend into one another in a dreamy, if disconcerting, dance of liquid pixels. Face after face, style after style, artist after artist swirl and morph into one another like one of Dali’s hallucinogenic soft constructions.
It makes you want to grab your art books and start looking up the original paintings to see them in their original setting as you watch the ingenious comparisons and relationships the filmmaker has found to connect them to one another.
The film is from a YouTube based director identified only as “eggman913″, whose other videos can be found here. I don’t see any easy link to more information about this individual, but he is obviously knowledgeable about art history, and has good taste in paintings.
You can have fun playing “name that painting” or even “name that artist” with your friends, or just think about how women have been represented over the history of art, the differing standards of what was considered “beautiful”, the evolution of painting materials and the development of artistic techniques and styles.
Repeated watching also leaves you with a renewed fascination with the relationship of facial features and how they define an individual, the art of portraiture and the amazing ability human beings have to see vast differences in the subtle arrangement of the shapes, distances, colors and spatial relationships that make up a face.
The blending of styles is sometimes harmonious and sometimes a jarring juxtaposition, which makes the mention of the vid on Juxtapoz all the more appropriate. The original is on YouTube.
I originally heard about this both from BoingBoing and from Karl Kofoed
Interesting how sleepy looking eyes have been such a constant attribute of the culturally beautiful woman in European art. Watching the lids as the paintings morphed, I could see them moving from less to more closed (though surprisingly often there was almost no difference) but never to alert and fully open.
There must be some attitude that points to.