Trees lost from familiar works of art… still one of my most popular blog posts after more than three years. It certainly generated more interest than anything I ever did in my research career!
My excuse for re-blogging it is Marina Galperina’s animated GIFs that now give me the chance to revisit these visualisations through their animated versions, and the fun I can now have on Twitter! http://animalnewyork.com/2013/seurat-sans-all-the-trees/
Below are three famous paintings, but I’ve photoshopped out the trees. You get a point for naming the artist, and two further points if you know the name of the painting.
Answers at the bottom.
[This project came about as an attempt to visually represent “loss”. It’s one of the themes that I’ve been working on with the artist Alice Ladenburg. It is relatively easy to represent the importance of something that is present, but how do you capture or express the importance of something like deforestation that is all about the absence of something? It is not easy to focus a viewer’s attention on something that is not there! ]
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If you like these, let me know and I will do some others.
The answers are:
1) Constable’s “The Haywain”.
2) Seurat’s “Sunday afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte”.
3) Van Gogh’s “Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun”.
Forest Planet 