Presents!

• December 26th, 2005 • • reading, supplies •

Christmas presents were very nice to me this year! After years of trying to convince relatives that office supplies are plenty to keep me satisfied, my future-nephews kindly loaded up a box of markers, sticky notes and glue. Little darlings!

My mother gave me a surprising present. For a few years my RSS feeds have included a page-a-day from Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks. Every day a different page is featured, many talking about art techniques. (I understand that da Vinci can be lumped into one of the more “Coffee Table Book” artists, which is a damn shame, because he deserves a closer look.) Each page I find interesting: as da Vinci describes techniques in clear and simple terms concepts I’ve seen book after book for. Example: “Perspective is nothing else than the seeing of an object behind a sheet of glass, smooth and quite transparent, on the surface of which all things may be marked that are behind this glass; these things approach the point of the eye in pyramids, and these pyramids are cut by the said glass.”

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Ok, ok, that was rude. Perspective really wasn’t so obvious in da Vinci’s time, as evidenced by the large number of bizarre-looking buildings painted “way back when.” It was da Vinci that helped to clear all that up for us, so that perspective is obvious, thank God, and we don’t have to go about figuring complex mathematical formulas to build cubes.

Speaking of obvious, I’ve digressed! Yes yes, I’ve been reading the Notebooks which are a wealth of information. Sadly, as noted on the RSS feed site, while you can get a FREE version of the Notebooks from Project Gutenberg there are no pictures. My wonderful mother gave me a glorious, hardcover version of the notebooks: with pictures!

YEE-HAW!

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