Why paintings look great /  by Mirena Rhee

Some think that art is about rendering something, representing it in some perfect way. If that were the case then once photography was out we would have photographed everything and that would have been the end of painting.

Painting is an imperfect representation built out of many and millions of little strokes that look total nonsense in a close-up. But at the same time, a painting has an almost infinite resolution as far as the eye can see because the little strokes are also very interesting just by themselves the way they weave together. That's why people look at painting sometimes really closely or with a magnifying glass because they want to see the tiny little imperfections, to see how it was done and how the hand flicked.

And then there is the artist with anger and sadness and happiness in all the imperfect feelings and the history of the artist. A painting reflects the imperfect state of the artist. If the artist were in perfect harmony they'd be on a beach somewhere. They are all kinds of cataclysms that are perfectly unseen and get transmitted from the artist into the painting.

Especially in Old Masters works, paintings were done with transparent glazes. Like layering hundreds of different paintings that together make the whole.

Old Master paintings look luminous even though they seem dark because the light shines through the layers and reflects off of the back, it hits the bottom white ground surface of the canvas and shines back through the layers.

Because painting is not an exact science and is not like painting by the numbers, every single dot on the landscape of the painting is composed of all kinds of different specks. Because no painter is precise with the colors there's always a lot of mixing going on, not a single dot is a pure color, there are all kinds of impurities and resins that blend with the color grains.

Paintings look different on a screen because they are three-dimensional objects built with multiple layers of overlapping lattices of particles.

Let's talk about particles. The paint layer of a painting consists of many millions of tiny particles suspended in some kind of resin. Most natural pigments in paint are ground dirt and minerals. Different pigments have different properties of course in the way they reflect light and color but most importantly each tiny particle shines and reflects light in a different direction so there is this iridescence. The particles are suspended in resin, like gems set in gold. As you move around the painting you perceive them glittering. Imagine millions and millions of tiny particles shimmering suspended in very many layers of resin, twice. The light is reflected from the ground layer back through the particles and into the eyes of the viewer.

Oftentimes the aging process of a painting adds additional details like cracks, patina, and dirt; these are not necessarily flaws. Even if there are flaws, most forgers do try to make canvases look old, not new so there is a preciousness to that process.

Great Art vs. Bad Art /  by Mirena Rhee

I wanted to write today about a topic that is difficult because there is the general opinion that you can't judge art and that there's some quality to drawing and painting that is difficult to understand. Even great artists themselves have written that they don't know what beauty is or they have implied that they kind of work on intuition or some other unidentifiable quality or action.

There is a definitive and very clear difference between great art and bad art. One of the reasons why social or political art has very little shelf life is not because of the message but because the message is the only thing that has been left to carry the work. When artists create social or political work they leave that aspect to be the main pillar of their presentation and because they already delivered the message they never care to remove the imperfections from the work.

You have seen many occasions where great artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo drew many sketches of future work. Do you know why they did that? Because they had an idea and they wanted to gradually remove the imperfections from the idea, from the drawing, from the design before they committed it to the canvas or to the board or to the wall or whatever they were working on.

Do you know why Picasso is so famous for his work? I don't know if you know this but his paintings were not done in one go although they look it. His paintings look like he just came up with something and quickly drew it. Guernica looks like he just sketched something on a big wall however behind each line there are hundreds of studies that he did to find the perfect expression for each head be it a human or a horse. They only look like they've been quickly conceived but there are days and days of deliberate sketchwork behind each shape. I saw this with my eyes in Reina Sofia when right next to the Guernica there was a whole room of preparatory paintings, with many versions of the actual shapes that went into the final painting. He gradually removed imperfections until he arrived at the precise shape that worked.

I used to work at Lucasfilm, and Lucasfilm and Pixar are the two companies in the world with some of the highest standards committed to film. Do you ever wonder why Pixar and Lucasfilm make the best digital movies? They have a process where they painstakingly remove flaws.

When I worked at Lucasfilm we had weekly meetings where each artist's work would be deliberately scrutinized on a theater-sized screen by not only the art leads but everyone on the team. Everything that didn't work was scratched and had to be redone.

While I was still working for Lucasfilm I used to come over to New York City to brush up on my old school drawing and painting and I would go to museums and study all the old Masters. This went on and on for years. I also went to each major museum in the world to each major painter and studied their paintings in person but that's an entirely new topic that I'm not going to talk about today.

I once went to the Morgan Library Museum in New York, where there was an exhibition of Albrecht Durer. I saw a drawing that was 500 years old and it was very small and done with simple brown ink on paper. It was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen and is the underdrawing for his famous engraving Adam and Eve.

They're hundreds of variations of this drawing by Durer. In the final work which was one of his masterpieces all the flaws that he could see to the best of his ability have been removed.

Do you know why major Hollywood directors, the Masters of the film craft, make movies that stand out from everybody else's? Because Hollywood masters of film are persistent removers of flaws from their movies. They nitpick every single detail to the great pain of their producers, of movie studios and of course, people who work under them.

Great work is really hard to do not only because it has to be free of flaws but because the person who does that work needs to know how to go about it.

There's a second and significant aspect to great work and it is the ideas in the deep work that underlie it and serve as a solid foundation for the work. How can you possibly tell deep work from shallow work, the difference is that there's absolutely nothing random or accidental in great work.

If you were sitting next to Rembrandt and you asked him why he used that particular paint or that particular stroke and how is it that he made that seeming mess work wonders to the eyes - he is going to have a definitive answer, he would know exactly how the white that he uses works with other paints to create brilliant highlight effect, the mess was a result of meticulous wiping and reapplying paint simply because he was trying to remove the flaws from whatever he was trying to achieve in his painting. 

So if you look at Rembrandt's paintings, especially the ones that look almost three-dimensional and look like a total mess when you put your nose right next to them - it is because he accrued paint layer after paint layer where in each he would wipe out whatever was not working and would reapply paint and then he would wipe again and reapply until it worked. He would use sticks, fingers, forks, rags I don't know. Now all these scientists poking around are trying to figure out all these different composites in his work. He was getting rid of stuff and then reapplying stuff and rinsing and repeating until it worked.

I've seen many, many paintings where there was tons of paint and visible and recognizable shapes made on a canvas and there were colors and all kinds of things on there, but they collectively had no staying power, like the sum of the parts was no greater. Because they did not gradually remove flaws from the underlying idea. Many people in contemporary art make a design on a computer and they commit that design to the canvas. It's mostly painting by the numbers and you see that it was just applied once and it was considered done.

Well, the problem is like with any work once you commit it to the medium you have to go into a process that's called flaw removal, or in other words, you have to work on it. You have seen this process yourself when you've tried to do projects, in your own drawing and painting, or even do-it-yourself projects at home, things never work right off the bat.

Because nothing works right off the bat, if you have tried to draw and paint and you went, well, I can't do this. It's not because you can't do it but because you haven't learned how to remove the flaws and improve it. Because even the greatest artists in the world start with something really stupid and lame that doesn't work and they gradually work on making it better, more beautiful, and with a higher standard by removing the flaws and imperfections in many rounds of judging and arriving at something if not entirely flawless - much better than the first piece. If you do this consistently for 20, 30 years you get great art.


The Couch /  by Mirena Rhee

I watch people move all the time in New York City and I'm astonished at the lengths people go to to move bulky furniture. 

I used to do that too.

Every piece of bulky furniture you buy will cost you thousands of dollars over your lifetime, and thousands of hours of your life.

First, you are going to spend hours looking for the right piece.

Then you have to buy it.

Then you have to move it in place once it arrives.

Then you have to fill it with stuff, butts, or whatever.

You will spend hours putting things in and out of it over its lifetime.

You will end up buying more stuff so you can put things in it.

You are going to spend hours taking care of it.

It's going to take the place of air in your room.

It's going to take space in your mind.

It's usually going to be brown.

And then one day you are going to stop liking it.

You are going to start hating it.

It's going to eat you alive for days.

You are going to try to sell it or put it in storage.

Or you will need to move and take it with you.

The moving company will come, wrap it up, load it on the truck, transport it, unload it, put it up in the new house, and unwrap it.

You are going to be fed up with it anyway.

You are going to try to sell it or put it in storage.

This will cost you hours of your life and the storage fees will cost you several pieces of furniture over your lifetime.

You will begin the vicious circle of trying to find a new piece.

Once I bought a $5,000 couch from Macy's.

I think I spent 3 weeks after taxes working for it.

It took me two sets of movers to move it upstairs.

It took me another set of movers to move it to a new place.

I loved it but for the most part, it was just there. 

At some point, I used it as a bed but I could have just slept on a futon on the floor.

I sold it to a gay couple who loved it and I was happy to get rid of it.

But before that, I had other people come and sit on it, didn't like the dimple in the middle, and didn't buy it.

The thing is that I still think about it.

Free space and your mind.

Bulky furniture will cost you years of your life.

I currently do not own any furniture.

I only use whatever I find on the street in New York and put everything back.

We did have a difficult relationship, there were two years we didn't speak. But what is that compared to the eternity without us in the universe /  by Mirena Rhee

I have the feeling that our atoms after death reassembling into other things in the universe in some way continue us although a little bit more spread out. So we go back into the soup maybe a little more integrated into it, but we're still entrenched in the fabric of the universe so it is possible that some kind of aspect of our consciousness continues forever. I already feel my integration with the entire universe although I do not see any special effects in front of my eyes.

6 months since my dad passed away /  by Mirena Rhee

He was a leader, innovator and a traveler. He loved solving difficult technical and manufacturing problems in his work, and was a trusted advisor to me and other members of the family.

I took this picture of him while he was visiting me at Lucasfilm.

Axiom spacesuit is awful! milan, prada my ass /  by Mirena Rhee

If you deliver this spacesuit design to Elon Musk you'd be fired on the spot. It is dated, uninspired, ugly bikini area, wtf crop top, arms come out like pipes out of a water heater. Helmet's like a glass melon and materials looks like a tent. Short pants and baby blue soles?

I think what happened is Prada told them it looks cool and they agreed. I mean Prada is the master of luxury bullshit that no one needs, I am sure they will easily transition from handbags to spacesuits. Like they give fucks about space.

Pre-historic rock art in Egypt /  by Mirena Rhee

Tell me art doesn't have staying power. What other shit remains from back then? And you know what it is still beautiful 5 to 7,000 years later.

A pigment, a scratch, a line and a surface, no need for any fancy to make art. This is why it's magic, it is so simple at first glance. Art sneaks up on you, you are moved, by a few scratches on a rock.

Tell me you're not moved by this art!