Who Wants to See Something Cool?

One thing I originally intended to do with this blog was to give a mini-micro-shout-out to nifty pieces of art that came my way. It's an aspect I haven't really paid much attention to, owing mostly to my general state of woeful neglect. The truth is, you don't have to go far out of your way on the internet to find something that makes you go "O_o," so I haven't felt much pressure to point them out.

But then again, I love to blather, and what better to blather 'bout than trivial things that chance to come my way? It's a time-honored* internet tradition.

*On the internet, three years counts as an honorably long time.

In any event, I'm going to proceed with significantly more than 140 characters, because everybody knows that more is, in fact, more.

Today's web curiosity came to me via an e-mail from my mom, and Lord knows from where it came to her. As far as I can tell it was made by a Russian person, and it is an animated sketch of a woman, drawn from the inside out.

(That's the link you're supposed to click.)

Pretty neat, eh?

It's worth going over the technical stuff for a bit, though I don't know a thing about drawing. Suffice it to say, it's a fine bit of sketch-ery, with an obvious focus on accurate anatomy and all those other things artist types think are important. At least, I think they think they're important. I've never really known what they're thinking.

I really like watching this thing for the tansformative theme it suggests. What starts as an anatomical exercize veers momentarily into eroticism, and just as quickly metamorphosizes into urbane sophistication. A sharper eye than mine might perceive more stages than these; what I felt fairly sure about seeing was a collection of several "women" within the single woman depicted. It could be a commentary on gender roles or female nature, or perhaps merely a clever way of phrasing the old truth that when it comes to human beings (male or female), "there's more than meets the eye."

What I really like about this particular type of presentation is the way it integrates the process of composition and construction into the final image. Most works of art are not accessible to most people beneath their outward appearances; we might imagine, for instance, that Da Vinci simply sat down and painted the Mona Lisa, when in fact a great deal of arduous compositional work was done, and at various stages of its actual construction, the painting would have barely resembled the image that now adorns everything from postage stamps to ironic T-shirts. Watching an artistic image actually come into being is dull for outsiders, but speed it up as an animation, and it becomes nearly miraculous to behold.

None of this has anything at all to do with anything, of course. I just thought we all might enjoy that. If you'd like to see more, there's a whole bunch of them to be found here.