Fee‘s Art History Blog

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

Loyalty (1869)

Da Vinci stepped into a realm of anatomy and technique that no-one had ever done before. He Mastered light in a time where they were just painting the background and the subject the exact same focus.

What we understand about aperture, perspective, the human eye- Da Vinci was utilising before the scientific community even knew what a retina did. Do you understand how Crazy that is.

He invented a 3D stereoscopic picture in the 1500s. It would take two more centuries before physicists even arrived at the concept of stereography.

Do you understand how much math that is. A lot of fucking math man.

And I'm not even talking about colour or texture rn!!! He did it so we can't see the brushstrokes! It would require x-rays to view the work he did.

I just know sometimes people go oh why's this painting so special- it's very important to me that you know that the Mona Lisa was like an Atomic Bomb on the Renaissance art community. Almost EVERY piece of art you view today you could track it's influence back to what da Vinci did.