A hi-rez, in-depth dive into one of the most gruesome and virtuoso paintings of hell by an old master painter. BEWARE: Extreme Details! Halloween 2021 appropriate. Dirk Bouts painted “The Fall of the Damned” in 1470, 20 years before Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. This is a spectacular, underrated, and obscure painting that deserves to be appreciated as a masterpiece of the late Middle Ages and the Northern Renaissance, and of all time. I discovered this painting on my own, and took it upon myself to share it with you. There is no other YouTube video about this painting, and no other video period. I trust my own eyes.
The video also explores paintings of Hell by Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden.
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Dirk Bouts’ painting “Fall of the Damned” is a masterful conjuring of hell. Post contains extreme details.
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Note: this post is a duplicate of the newly, long overdue revamping of my “new art” page, but you can also go directly to the page . The new version is simplified and updated (there are over 150 pieces), and there are blog posts devoted to all but a handful of my oldest pieces that…
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This image may look familiar. It’s a more elaborate version of an experiment I started 10 days ago. See below: In the newer version I added 4 more droid ships, clouds, mist, made the waves more apparent, tweaked out the lighting, and did some post-production in Photoshop. Now it’s less a rogue scout ship, and…
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The droid-ship is back. You might remember it from months back. I spent forever creating it, and put it in a few short animations, but never really did a definitive image or two or three to show it off. These aren’t that either, necessarily, as they are more studies or experiments. I didn’t pose his…
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Woke up this morning with an idea for an experiment using Blender, and this is the outcome. It combines elements of organic modeling (the face), hard surface modeling (everything else], and scene building, though that’s relatively minimal here. One of the good things about Blender is once you create something you can re-use it in…
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Here are some quick studies I made using Blender’s native ocean and mountain creating properties. The program did 95% of the work here. I did the rest. Once I figured out how to do it, it took just minutes to come up with new versions. I got put off of 3D for a while after…
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Lots of monks are out doing their daily alms at 6:00 a.m., when I hit the pavement. I don’t get in their faces for Nat Geo style photo ops. I keep a respectful distance. But I do feel a wee bit of comradery when out for a morning escapade. And then there’s the shop-owners and…
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You’re forgiven if you never heard of her. I never had either until an artist colleague emailed me an excerpt from her book, The Fraud of Contemporary Art. Almost everything by her and about her is in Spanish because she’s a Mexican art critic. Her biggest claim to fame is accidentally destroying a work of…
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My restoration and recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Also, my 2.5 hour documentary video analyzing the physical painting, restoration ,and what went horribly awry.
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It’s finally here, after months of work. It’s coming in at 2 hours and 24 minutes, which I would not have even thought was possible in the beginning. You’d think that means I just ramble on endlessly, but it’s highly scripted for most of it, and tightly edited. It follows a very logical progression, covering…
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In which reddit moderators that censored and banned me claim that digital imaging is inherently racist.
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My version of the Salvator Mundi makes the shortcomings of the supposedly authentic da Vinci painfully evident, and in plain sight.
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My digital restoration of the Salvator Mundi makes a visual argument as to why the physical restoration is not representative of Leonardo’s hand.
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The video focuses on the fact that the big name art stars make art, not for their artists peers, or even for themselves, but rather for the billionaire buyers who they think are suckers waiting to be fleeced. This art, further, is coming out of the Duchampian, anti-art, appropriationist tradition, which incidentally allows artists to churn out bigger and slicker products, faster, and get them into the marketplace for the purposes of speculation and moving money. Quite naturally, art made to sell fast to suckers with millions in disposable income doesn’t appeal to artists and connoisseurs who love art for its inherent qualities.
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Is the Salvator Mundi really a painting by Leonardo da Vinci? Why are Christ’s eyes so wonky? Who broke the nose of Jesus? And why are there so many amateur mistakes? The painting doesn’t appear good enough to be by the great artist, but there’s a surprise revelation.
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Got a bit carried away with a beginner Blender sculpting tutorial. Organic sculpting is the reason I decided to explore Blender months ago. For me, the ability to sculpt digitally is the most astounding capacity of digital art. To do something like the above by analogue means, I’d need a lot of space, materials, oodles…
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This alien is just the result of going through a tutorial and taking it in my own direction. I’m doing several organic sculpting tutorials in order to see how different artists approach the medium, and picking up which techniques work best for me. Here’s the tutorial I was going off of I gave my alien…
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This one’s 420 frames, and comes out to 17 seconds. It’s more sophisticated technically than my earlier animations, and the video includes sound. ~ Ends
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I’m retiring from politics. I’d managed to avoid engaging in the political quagmire for months on end, largely because I publicly pledged to do so after the media and politicians created an extremely volatile, self-fulfilling prophecy of racial discord, hatred, distrust, and violence, all in the name of advertising clicks and other ulterior motives. I…
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Mission accomplished. I wanted to knock out a full-fledged, original 3D scene before the year was over, and make a print [see bottom of post]. I’m planning more scenes with this droid, and I already shared a test scene, but here I created the landing bay, posed the droid with its arms and fastening disc…
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I vowed on September 26th not to say anything on my blog about politics until the election was over. I succeeded, and it’s a lot harder to NOT speak out than it is to vent. The election lingers, but the voting is over. I just have a small observation or two. The vast majority of…
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The Enterprise has finally left on its maiden voyage into space, where it’s zooming along at warp speed 6. And that just reveals that I’ve been watching some Star Trek TS on Netflix above and beyond what was necessary to get screen shots of the ship at various angles. Above you can see the model,…
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Thought I’d knock this out in a day as practice, but I never intended to do the small lights, logos, lettering, or any of the more intense details. But once I stuck my toe in, I sunk waist deep, and then soon I was up to my eyeballs. In the end I took it as…
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Reflections in water — perhaps my very favorite visual phenomenon — are possible to create out of the computational ether in Blender. I didn’t need a clincher to persuade me that working in 3D might be the next avenue of my artistic exploration. I’d already said that Blender is God’s free gift to visual artists,…
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Above is a mech I made in Blender (v2.83.3). This was fun and compulsive, much like playing a mech war computer game I got into recently, before cutting myself off for wasting too much time on it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the program, and this creation was my version of a beginner tutorial…
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The alien required a flying saucer in the background. If you missed my last post, I’m just doing some practice using beginner techniques in Blender. I do a tutorial or two, take a break, and apply what I’ve learned. It’s a good combo. Instead of getting sick of doing tuts, after messing around on my…
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Took a break from the rank beginner tutorials to have some fun being creative with the basic building blocks. I’m always going to make aliens, and I’ve been doing it for more than a quarter century. Aliens, robots, cyborgs, and monsters. Green is also my favorite color. I’ve always loved ’em. This one’s greeting us,…
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And that’s about as far as I could take her. if you’ve followed the development of this piece on my blog you know it was an exercise in technique, and based loosely on a tutorial. It’s evolved into something a bit more, and I’d consider it part of my portfolio. Along the way I discovered…
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I’m not that big of a fan of photo-bashing. That’s a technique where you take photos and superimpose them on your digital painting in order to achieve textural effects. It can be a cheap cheat that looks cheesy, or it can be a sophisticated process that when done right can really add something. Here I’ve…
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This started out as an exercise in lighting, shading, and workflow, but it ended up being an artwork I’m proud of. A lot of the techniques and procedures I employed I got from a digital painting course by veteran Disney animator, Aaron Blaise. The initial drawing and the character design are all my own. If…
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This is the second in this series of portraits for 2022, and directed toward the digital art NFT community. No, it is not a self-portrait. The faces I’ve used so far are ones I generated using AI. Usually people manipulate the algorithms to create unrealistically beautiful, unbelievable, and fashionable people, but I wanted to explore…
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NO, THAT IS NOT A SELF PORTRAIT, OR BASED ON ONE! I haven’t been nearly as active here, because I’ve been wrangling with the NFT sphere, which is the best place for digital artists to make money. The halcyon days of unknown digital artists getting rich selling NFTs may be over. Inevitably, the market would…
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Things are starting to get more grim for our hapless spider. And he’s looking sufficiently realistic that his torment strikes me as cruel — I like spiders — in which case, just in case, I’m letting you know it’s not a real spider. He’s affixed to the cross with a giant spike. Above you can…
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A spider for a work in progress, made in Blender.
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The crumpled paper above is not art, even if it was put on a pedestal, and under glass, and exhibited in a museum. And that’s OK. You can handle it. In the case of Martin Creed’s crumpled paper, it’s not art, it’s bullshit. However, there can be all manner of endeavors that are skilled, intelligent,…
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Spider in progress which will be part of a whole scene.
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This is an important distinction, and the art world has placed so much more value on information than texture over the last century that texture has been banished to the periphery when discussing art. I recently watched a video about Kara Walker’s monument, Fons Americanus, and while the narrator analyzed how it quotes and challenges…
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It’s a very bad idea to try to steal my art and sell it as your own, and for a few devastating reasons. I only share comparatively low resolution images of my work online, which means you have a third-rate version, and I have a hi-rez original to prove authorship. There is always going to…
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This is the second video in my Abominable Ideas in Art series, and based on a group of articles I wrote a few years ago. Here I tackled the ubiquitous and self-righteous notion that all art is political. People assume this is a progressive idea, but because it places art (all art and art history]…
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Over the last week or so YouTube’s algorithm, or perhaps whomever manipulates it, eased off the stranglehold on my videos. New comments and subscribers started to trickle in after weeks of silence. And so, I thought, perhaps it wasn’t a waste of time after all. I also noticed that people have watched over 3,000 hours…
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The most important thing to understand here is that the sanctity of the individual is the most universal and comprehensive — you could even say collective — way of thinking about political and economic systems because everyone is an individual. Some people would want to scream “Libertarian”, but some libertarians seem more concerned with the…
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Anything you can find in Google maps satellite mode, and that has 3 dimensional elements, can be captured, converted, and opened in Blender. For this experiment, I chose Notre-Dame in Paris. There’s a wee bit of hacking, and you need an additional program plus an add-on, but then it all works alright to get it…
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My tweaked results of a Blender Tutorial by Ryan King.
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New trailer for my feature length Salvator Mundi documentary
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This is a kind of relaxing work I like to do. Just start drawing with one brush, and mostly on one layer, in Photoshop. Completely unpremeditated. See what emerges. It’s a little like doing a puzzle. I did this a couple weeks ago, but haven’t been sharing much because I had a big move across…
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Followers of my blog may wonder what the hell happened to me. Well, I’ve been working hard on this feature-length art documentary, including, among many other things, my own recreation of the Salvator Mundi. I decided to share with you some custom graphics I made on the fly. Anyone who grew up watching Star Trek…
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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