Tag: paintings

News

New painting collection stands up for the value of digital art

We live in a time of artistic plenty. At any moment, anyone with an internet connection can simply type a few words into their browser and have immediate and free access to history’s most famous paintings, music, and theater. Even lesser-known works are often available to view as photographs on the personal websites of the artists who made them. This is easy to take for granted, but it is important to remember that seeing a work of art used to require either purchasing it for oneself, visiting it in person, or at the very least buying an art book. With…
Review

Layers of Fear can’t transform the tortured artist trope

On January 2nd, George R.R. Martin came clean with his readers about his progress on the sixth book of A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-present): Winds of Winter would not be published before season 6 of Game of Thrones (2011-present) goes to air on HBO. Readers could choose not to watch the show as it is released, but as any basically sociable person with a stable Internet connection knows, dodging Game of Thrones spoilers is a hopeless occupation. Martin explained his disappointment in a long post on his blog with an apology that laid bare some of his anxieties…
News

A love letter to the stony architecture of Ico

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. In Ruins (PC, Mac) TOM BETTS The craggy, mysterious ruins of Ico’s fortress-like castle are known for their wind-blown eeriness. Tom Betts has taken that game’s architecture and used its melancholy character as a model for one of his experiments into procedural generation. The idea, he says, is to interpret the work of Romantic landscape painters, such as Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich, as a sublime videogame. The result is an island of broken ramparts, cold beaches, and overgrown pathways that lead to crumbling…
News

Max Ernst’s surreal forest paintings get a videogame tribute

Textures in games are hardly ever painterly. There are clear cut examples of games trying to emulate the look of a painting (like Okami’s cel-shaded, oil painting art style), while others are literally hand painted (like Double Fine’s Broken Age)—but to find a genuine surreal art style implemented into a game would be much harder to pinpoint. In Saint Petersburg-based digital artist Yuliya Kozhemyako’s latest project La forêt, Kozhemyako seeks to emulate the surreal paintings of German artist Max Ernst. Ernst was a pioneer of surreal art, helping to formulate the obscure Dada avant-garde movement in Berlin and Cologne. Among his…