Discovering: d̶a̶ ̶V̶i̶n̶c̶i̶ Derek

Leonardo da Vinci was born in a town called Vinci in 1452. He left behind thousands of pages of journals and hundreds if not thousands of works of art. He was obsessed with mirrors and painted more portraits than anything else (that we know of) so it's been sort of a mystery as to what he really looked like. Why aren't there more, if any, obvious portraits of himself?




Almost every artist, especially painters, and even more so - painters who paint portraits paint themselves a lot. If you have the urge to start painting, and there is no one around - you are always there. I know personally that I have more pictures of myself than anything else. Why? Cause i'm there, all the time.

I would imagine that Leonardo painted himself, a lot. I would go so far as to say he was his own greatest subject. He was obsessed with mirrors, he painted a lot, he wasn't always around a lot of people, and getting people to stay still for long amounts of time is very difficult. When you are loo…

In a previous post I confused this painting of Salvator Mundi





Salvator Mundi

With this one below. The one above is obviously very similar and was by Bernardino Luini who was said to have worked directly with Leonardo. I had thought it was the painting to have been authenticated to be by da Vinci. I tried the mirroring technique and it worked almost identically on both paintings - both Luini's and da Vinci's. They definitely shared techniques and these paintings were inspired by each other. It would be interesting to know who painted which -first. I would go with Luini trying to emulate Leo.

I believe that Leo and his fellow artists would try to compete with each other to see who could paint a more complicated and "better" painting. Not only that but Leonardo was trying to teach his friends and apprentices and what better way than "Try to do this!"






The curls in the hair are reminiscent of St. John the baptist, and the hands and skin look like the Mona L…

Animal Planet: Animal Oddities

I randomly stumbled upon this online.. It's one of the most haunting things i've ever read. Its been stuck in my head ever since. ahhhhhh I'm not sure who wrote it, but wow..

http://rip747.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/russian-sleep-experiment-the-best-short-story-ive-read/


""Russian researchers in the late 1940’s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn’t kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and 5 inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running water and toilet, and enough dried food to last all five for over a month.

The test subjects were political prisoners deemed enemies of the state during world war II.
Everything was fine for the first 5 day…