Modern painters

What Hacker News says

1. DaubNov 2022
   Thank you for your response.

   Frankly... sorting the wheat from the cruft is a major task as there has been so much written on the subject. I would recommend that art be separately considered with respect to it's history (time/place), aesthetics (it's formal parameters) and process (how it was made).

   On the subject of art history, I would recommend any art history book that places art in standard sequential order (i.e. 'canon'). Even a child's primer on the subject would be sufficient. A lot can be learned about art by simply placing it in sequential order. Only then can you see that art grew in response to the time/place of its manufacture. If you need a recommendation, then you could do no worse than 'The Art Book' (Phaidon).

   More specifically, art produced pre- and post- 1900 needs different treatment as they are different things.

   - For art produced pre 1900, the classic tome is 'The Story of Art' by Ernst Gombrich. He may be a bit sneered at nowadays, but he knew his stuff.

   - For art produced post 1900 'The Shock of the New' by Robert Hughes is a great primer. Also 'Ways of Seeing' by John Berger is aimed at students and presents high-brow ideas in a very digestible manner.

   On the subject of aesthetics, I would recommend 'Toward a Psychology of Art' by Rudolph Arnheim. He may now be considered rather old fashioned but he is one of the few thinkers on art who effectively addressed its formal attributes. He also drew, which is a plus. In the same vein there is Ruskin (Modern Painters) who really understood how an artist thinks, and was no slouch as an artist (draftsman) himself.

   On color in art I would recommend Bruse MacEvoy's Handprint website. On the topic of color, he has forgotten more than most people would ever know. In my opinion, he is superior to Goethe and Johannes Itten (both art school favorites but both highly questionable). He does not always organize his thinking as well as might be hoped, but that is the nature of color: pan-dimensional and perverse. Also 'Color space and its divisions' Kuehni, R. G. (2001).

   The making of art is a process, yet we only see the finished thing. This is our loss as there is much to be learned by studying this process. On the creative process much has been much written, some of it very high-brow. However, the book I would most highly recommend is rather coffee table: 'Daily Rituals: How Artists Work' by Currey, M. (2013). Nothing gives deeper insight into the mind of a creator than how they timetable their productive life.

   Finally, I would recommend that art be experienced 'in situ', in front of the actual artwork. I was speaking to a student a few days ago who claimed to have seen the work of Rothko. Of course they had not, they had only seen photos of it. Nuf said.

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2. RobertKeransSep 2019
   Traffic by Ruskin I reread quite a lot. For background, it's a lecture he gave when invited to speak, as the eminent architectural critic of the day, to dignitaries on the opening of a new exchange building. Was expected to talk about the architecture, but he talked about capitalism instead

   > You shall have thousands of gold pieces; - thousands of thousands - millions - mountains of gold: where will you keep them?

   More technical, but I constantly use Ruskin's Modern Painters as art reference. Each volume has detailed chapelters on natural forms (trees, mountains, etc). The attempts at geometric drawings of the structures of cloud patterns are particularly beautiful imo. He's a phenomenal writer, anyway.

   Mentioned by others elsewhere in the comments, but Candide and The Count of Monte Cristo are possibly my two favourite books. The first one feels incredibly modern, which is quite impressive given that it's basically the first European novel. Second one I've always thought is like an exceptionally good airport novel (and the sci-fi version is also one of my favourite books, and one of the best sci-fi novels ever written). Very difficult to put down.

   Also, anything by Swift, Hazlitt, Twain I can read and reread endlessly. I read a lot of opder stuff, but I've noticed I'm often quite quick to discard it if it doesn't scan as contemporary writing -- those three I find in particular have quite modern styles

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3. argimenesDec 2013
   'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem

   'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham

   'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold

   'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman

   'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie

   'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan Wrigley

   'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly

   'Modern Painters: volume 1' by John Ruskin

   'Aratra Pentelici' by John Ruskin

   'The Art and Craft of Drawing' by Vernon Blake

   'The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci' by Dmitri Merezhkovsky ('romance' in the old sense of 'biographical novel')

   'Prehistoric Avebury' by Aubrey Burl

   'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller

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4. raincoleSep 2025
   I honestly believe the problem of books of our time is that they're still too long. By at least a factor of 2.

   Books are 200 pages long not because they have 200 pages of content to say, but because there is no business model for publishing physical books of 50 to 100 pages long.

   We see the more is better mentality everywhere in marketing. On Udemy, instructors flaunt how many hours of videos their courses have. On Steam, we see "X levels, Y different enemies, Z characters" all the time. In OP article:

   > Open the Victorian bestseller “Modern Painters” by John Ruskin and you will find that its first sentence is 153 words long

   As if this is a good thing.

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