» Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition): Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters

Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition): Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Hackney
Comment: There are so many problems with this book it's difficult to even know what to say. Since so much of that has already been covered I'll just add what I can from personal experience. I've been academically trained as an artist and can attest that people can actually draw difficult things now and since perspective was worked out. It just takes time and training. There's no reason to use these devices as once you learn to draw they actually make things much more difficult and it's impossible to use them for painting with any real useful effect. Many artists did use them but rarely and more out of curiosity. Hockney has just decided to completely ignore all the history that we have, from artists themselves, people who sat for artists, historians and scholars and just make crap up! It's incredible and heartbreaking that this man can be taken seriously. There are so many flaws to his argument it's almost a text book on logical fallacies. Even scientific American did an article refuting his so called scientific evidence! If you want to know the real techniques of the old masters buy Classical Painting or Drawing Atelier by Julliette Aristedes, or Traditional oil painting by Virgil Elliot, these are people who have dedicated their lives to traditional painting and training and should be infinitely more famous and applauded than this idiot.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A worthwhile contribution by David Hockney
Comment: Many reviews have questioned the value of this book, and it's true that this book might not be very interesting to the general reader or hobbyist painter. However what fault of that rests on Hockney's shoulders? The rest of the negative reviews seem to center around some imagined insult by Hockney of old master techniques. I found none of that in this book. My criticism tend toward the amateurish nature of Hockney's argument, but then again he is an amateur. The real gravitates of this book lies for me in what it could mean for modern painting.

There are many artists who draw with a "sharp focus" realistic technique today, but they don't rate very high as artists because philosophically they've yet made much of a case for themselves. Far from being a put down of the old masters as so many of the other negative reviews allege it actually opens new vistas for modern painters by challenging some the prevailing beliefs about painting and the effect photography has had upon it. Modern movie technology is the logical outcome of the artistic visions many old masters if the thesis of this book holds (and granted that is still an if) not Matisse, de kooning or Jasper Johns.

Modern painting has been driven by it's status as unique material object and the economic consequences of that are implied by a painting's rarity. David Hockney's book suggests how a realistic style of painting in an age of photographic reproduction may once again find a successful argument.

In fact it successfully reframes non representational painting in a new, less appealing and somewhat juvenile, light. It's only a shame that Hockney wasn't a more polished academic and could have presented us a book with a more forceful argument.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Giving copies to friends
Comment: Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters

This book researches and explains the methods used by the old masters to achieve beautiful results in their realistic paintings. A must read. I buy it as gifts to educate my friends, artist & non artist alike. Cynthia

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Customer Rating:
Summary: too much words
Comment: quality of pictures is good,but words are too much,
it is different to read,

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very interesting
Comment: Despite some negative reviews here, I thought this was a good book, and I find Hockney's theory quite credible, due to a study I did some time ago.

Twenty years ago, I wrote what was probably the most detailed analysis of perspective and visual distortions in van Gogh's famous painting, Bedroom at Arles. The research showed that the visual system can create several spatial distortions in a painting if the painter fails to map out a precise perspective. These deviations from geometric perspective--such as exaggerating the perceived sizes of objects in the foreground (to about 20 feet away from the observer), minimizing the sizes of objects in the distance, and the famous overall hyperbolic distortion of the human visual field, were clearly demostrable using standard perspective analysis, especially using the advanced techiques that I learned from Dubery and Willits's fine book on the subject.

I wasn't the first to note them, as these distortions have been noted by many observers and discussed by the great John Ward and Patrick Heelan in their journal articles in The Art Bulletin on the same painting, but no one had done the full quantitative analysis yet or linked them to the visual neurobiology. In addition, van Gogh also showed a spiral or torsional twist in some paintings that suggested something further in the way of physiological optics going on or perhaps even something neurological.

Through close obsevation of the real world, the great artists are aware of many of these problems, and how difficult it is to paint perspective precisely, and ever since my earlier study I've always suspected that Hockney's hypothesis was correct, I just didn't have the data myself, since I was working in a somewhat different field of perceived visual distortions in paintings that result from the operation of the human visual system itself.

So Hockney's thesis seems very plausible to me. I note one very negative review, but based on my own investigations, I think Hockney is probably right. Various geometric drawing devices and optical projective devices were available to the artists of old, and it's very likely that at least some, and perhaps many of them, used them as integral aids in their painting. Furthermore, there is the obvious case of anamorphic art in the Baroque period, where artists were known to have used optical devices to paint pictures that couldn't even be understood without the use of cyclindrical mirrors.

I found Hockney's book well written and a very interesting read. I think he did a great job on it and I learned a lot myself.

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