I had lunch with Erin today for valentines day and ate way too much food. I had some time between lunch and my meeting with Joe, so I went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Don’t know if everyone knows this, but we get in free with our Mass Art ID’s. There was a really cool show of work by British printmakers working between WWI and WWII. The wall told me that the these printmakers were very influenced by the concepts the futurists were dealing with, most notably motion and machinery. I also got to check out the Sumo woodblock prints from Japan which seemed appropriate after gorging myself at lunch.
I had a little bit of an agenda going in. Elaine made the good suggestion that I check out the use of perspective in Asian art work. In addition to to the Sumo prints I found some Indian miniature paintings that used something like an isometric view, and some Chinese brush paintings with a vertical or stacked method of suggesting depth. I think the evolution of perspective in painting would be an interesting thing to learn more about. Anybody know a good book on this topic? Found this article titled “A Chinese Perspective for Cyberspace”.