Early Movies and American Art

It’s exciting to see that there’s a new exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. exploring the connection between early movies and American Art at the time. They’ve juxtaposed monitors playing the earliest films with artwork dating from 1880 — 1910, and show fascinating links between early stop—action photos and paintings by Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast. Hassam and Prendergast were highly influence by Monet’s and Cezanne’s use of color and paint application in small patches and dabs. The brilliance of Impressionist and Post—Impressionist paintings was partly due to the fact that the viewer’s eye blended the dabs of color. Previously, it was common to mix colors on a palette before applying them to the canvas.
By painting with dabs of color next to each other, the artists allowed the viewer’s eye to blend them. Colors became brighter because of “persistence of vision,” when the eye retains an image of the color dab for a brief moment while looking at the next. See how Prendergast used small patches of color in his work “Picnic.”

It is the same persistence of vision that creates the illusion of motion in a moving picture. The individual frames of the movie blend together because of the delay that holds an image of the frame for an instant. This momentary retention of an image, or dab of colored paint, lasts about 1/30th of a second, but that’s enough time to blend the two into a seamless unit that either fools us into seeing continuous movement, or creates the bright flash of a new color.

You can try a few interesting visual experiments to experience your persistence of vision.

Tube—o—vision:
1. Get a cardboard mailing tube about 3 inches wide and 2 feet long. This can be the tube from wrapping paper too.
2. Cut a slit in the closed end that’s 1—1/2 inches long and 1/8 inch wide.
3. Close one eye and look through the open end of the tube. Be sure to block out any light by cupping your hand around the tube and your eye.
4. When you don’t move the tube, you see very little of the outside world. But when you look through the tube as you slowly sweep the tube back and forth, you’ll be surprised at how much of your surroundings you’ll see.
5. As you swing the tube back and forth your eye’s persistence of vision holds the narrow view through the slit for 1/30th of a second, but “pastes” it over the next tiny slit view creating what appears to be a continuous image.

Have A Nice Day:
1. Cut out the two circles. Glue them back to back, but be sure one is upside down.
2. Punch out two small holes.
3. Cut two 8” pieces of string and tie them through the holes.
4. Hold the string about 2” from the circles and spin them to see the message.