Lumia art

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Lumia is a form of art that uses light; originally associated with music but was later associated with painting. The term was coined by a twentieth-century artist, Thomas Wilfred. [1] In the early twentieth century, artists began to promote colors and light together in their works. [2] Wilfred worked towards establishing lumia as a new form of art, but the medium has yet to achieve popular recognition.

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Thomas Wilfred

Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) was the first artist in the United States to use light as the sole means of expression for his artwork. He consistently used colored light in his works. Wilfred was born in Denmark in 1889 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1916. Wilfred explored light and color in art as early as 1905. In 1921, Wilfred created his first portable clavilux, a machine that allowed for the creation and performance of lumia. Clavilux is a term in Latin that means "light played by key". In 1930 Wilfred founded a center for research in lumia, the Art Institute of Light. The institute closed down during World War II. In the early 1930s, he shifted from accompanying musical performances to using the light organ in galleries and painting exhibitions. [3] Wilfred planned to turn lumia into a formal art form, an "eighth art"; Wilfred wanted lumia to be its own art form of expression.

Lumia

The three main elements of lumia, defined by Wilfred, are form, color, and motion in a dark space. The most important are said to be form and motion. Wilfred's original contribution to lumia was the introduction of a fourth dimension - time. Since 1924, lumia accompanied music, dance, and drama. [3]

Musical aspects

In a musical sense, lumia is used to accompany music by adding a visual effect. Wilfred mentioned that Lumia has three factors, "Form, color, and motion are the three basic factors in lumia - as in all visual experience - and form and motion are the two most important." [1]

Clavilux

A term also coined by Thomas Wilfred to refer to his invention that allowed the creation and performance of lumia. Clavilux means "light played by key" in Latin. The term used by other artists was known as color organ.

Light Organ

Louis-Bertrand Castel invented the first light organ in the seventeenth century. [4] For more information check light organ or color organ.

Painting aspects

There are different forms of art that use light as a medium:

Light art

Light art is an art form that focuses on the expression of light. Light art includes stained glass which transmits light through colored glass. This type of art dates back to the 4th century. This art is found in churches and mosques with stained glass windows. Another used of light art is shadow puppetry in which shadows can create moving images. This art can be dated back to 380 BC by the use of Plato in the Allegory of the cave. Light art is even used in modern photography and motion pictures which uses artificial light to help captures images. Artists recognized for their use of light include James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, Leo Villareal, Mel and Dorothy Tanner, and George Stadnick.

Light painting

Light painting is a term used for a photographic technique. It is done by moving a light source or the camera while taking a long exposure photograph to produce a light painting. This creates a photograph that looks like it was painted with light. Painting with a light source dates back to 1889.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photography</span> Creating images by recording light

Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing, and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pastel</span> Art medium consisting of powdered pigment in the form of a stick

A pastel is an art medium in a variety of forms including a stick, a square a pebble or a pan of color; though other forms are possible; they consist of powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are similar to those used to produce some other colored visual arts media, such as oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation. The color effect of pastels is closer to the natural dry pigments than that of any other process. Pastels have been used by artists since the Renaissance, and gained considerable popularity in the 18th century, when a number of notable artists made pastel their primary medium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fine art</span> Art developed primarily for aesthetics

In European academic traditions, fine art is made primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork. In the aesthetic theories developed in the Italian Renaissance, the highest art was that which allowed the full expression and display of the artist's imagination, unrestricted by any of the practical considerations involved in, say, making and decorating a teapot. It was also considered important that making the artwork did not involve dividing the work between different individuals with specialized skills, as might be necessary with a piece of furniture, for example. Even within the fine arts, there was a hierarchy of genres based on the amount of creative imagination required, with history painting placed higher than still life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stained glass</span> Coloured glass and the works that are made from it

Stained glass is coloured glass as a material or works created from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant religious buildings. Although traditionally made in flat panels and used as windows, the creations of modern stained glass artists also include three-dimensional structures and sculpture. Modern vernacular usage has often extended the term "stained glass" to include domestic lead light and objets d'art created from foil glasswork exemplified in the famous lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color field</span> Art movement

Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

The term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical devices built to represent sound and accompany music in a visual medium. The earliest created color organs were manual instruments based on the harpsichord design. By the 1900s they were electromechanical. In the early 20th century, a silent color organ tradition (Lumia) developed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "color organ" became popularly associated with electronic devices that responded to their music inputs with light shows. The term "light organ" is increasingly being used for these devices; allowing "color organ" to reassume its original meaning.

Visual music, sometimes called color music, refers to the creation of a visual analogue to musical form by adapting musical structures for visual composition, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting; this was the original definition of the term, as coined by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Wassily Kandinsky. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, visual music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of visual music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Algorithmic art</span> Art genre

Algorithmic art or algorithm art is art, mostly visual art, in which the design is generated by an algorithm. Algorithmic artists are sometimes called algorists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Wilfred</span>

Thomas Wilfred, born Richard Edgar Løvstrøm, was a musician and inventor. He is best known for his light art, which he named lumia, and his designs for color organs called Clavilux. Wilfred was not fond of the term "color organ", and coined the word "Clavilux" from Latin meaning "light played by key". His innovative, kinetic works prefigured the advent of light art in America, and influenced subsequent generations of visual artists.

The phrase synesthesia in art has historically referred to a wide variety of artists' experiments that have explored the co-operation of the senses in the genres of visual music, music visualization, audiovisual art, abstract film, and intermedia. The age-old artistic views on synesthesia have some overlap with the current neuroscientific view on neurological synesthesia, but also some major differences, e.g. in the contexts of investigations, types of synesthesia selected, and definitions. While in neuroscientific studies synesthesia is defined as the elicitation of perceptual experiences in the absence of the normal sensory stimulation, in the arts the concept of synaesthesia is more often defined as the simultaneous perception of two or more stimuli as one gestalt experience. The usage of the term synesthesia in art should, therefore, be differentiated from neurological synesthesia in scientific research. Synesthesia is by no means unique to artists or musicians. Only in the last decades have scientific methods become available to assess synesthesia in persons. For synesthesia in artists before that time one has to interpret (auto)biographical information. For instance, there has been debate on the neurological synesthesia of historical artists like Kandinsky and Scriabin. Additionally, Synesthetic art may refer to either art created by synesthetes or art created to elicit synesthetic experience in the general audience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British and Irish stained glass (1811–1918)</span>

A revival of the art and craft of stained-glass window manufacture took place in early 19th-century Britain, beginning with an armorial window created by Thomas Willement in 1811–12. The revival led to stained-glass windows becoming such a common and popular form of coloured pictorial representation that many thousands of people, most of whom would never commission or purchase a painting, contributed to the commission and purchase of stained-glass windows for their parish church.

Clavilux is the term coined by the artist Thomas Wilfred to refer to his mechanical invention that allowed the creation and performance of lumia, which was Wilfred's term for light art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Painting</span> Practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Light art</span> Visual art using light as a medium

Light art or The Art of Light is generally referring to a visual art form in which (physical) light is the main, if not sole medium of creation. Uses of the term differ drastically in incongruence; definitions, if existing, vary in several aspects. Since light is the medium for visual perception, this way all visual art could be considered Art of Light absurdly enough; but most pieces of art are valid and coherent without reflecting on this basic perceptual fact. Some approaches on these grounds also include into the Art of Light those forms of art where light is not any medium contributing to the artwork, but is depicted. Thus, luminism may also refer to the Art of Light in the above sense, its previous usage point to painterly styles: either as an other label for the Caravaggisti in the baroque, or 19th and 20th centuries, fundamentally impressionist schools. Concerning light as a medium of art, historically the Art of Light is confined to the use of artificial light in artworks. This culminates in the paradoxical situation in which machines producing light environments are not the artworks themselves, but the artwork is how they modulate their environments, based on the conventionally taken-for granted, thus solely reflected fact that light is what constitutes our environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual arts</span> Art forms that create works that are primarily visual in nature

The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts also involve aspects of visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design and decorative art.

Timelines of inventions display the development and progression of art, design, architecture, music and literature.

Arild Rosenkrantz was a Danish nobleman painter, sculptor, stained glass artist and illustrator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Autonomous stained glass</span>

The term "autonomous" as applied to stained glass refers to works which are designed independent of architecture. Autonomous works are not designed to glaze windows. The term "stained glass" commonly precedes "window" and is thus linked to architecture both linguistically and conceptually. The autonomous work is more like a painting than a stained glass window, and is a non-traditional use of the medium. One critic somewhat pejoratively calls non-architectural stained glass "uncommissioned panels." Another traditionalist claims: "Stained glass can never be really satisfactory when considered as a bibelot to be hung up in the window or when sold in galleries like paintings for room decoration."

<i>The Cathedral (Katedrála)</i> Painting by František Kupka

The Cathedral (Katedrála) is an abstract painting created by Czech artist František Kupka in 1912–13. The medium is oil on canvas, and the painting’s dimensions are 180 × 150 cm. The painting is a part of the permanent Jan and Meda Mládek collection of Museum Kampa in Prague, Czech Republic. This painting is one of a series of abstract works that Kupka termed Vertical and Diagonal Planes. Vertical lines, running the entire length of the canvas are intersected by diagonal lines to form rectilinear shapes of various sizes. The diagonal lines run from the top left to the bottom right and from the top right to the bottom left of the painting. These rectilinear shapes are composed of blocks of black, white, and a range of blue, red, purple, gray, and brown color. The large black space between the two clusters of the shapes, and the arching of the top of the right cluster, brings to the viewer’s mind two stained glass windows illuminated by light in a dark cathedral.

French Gothic stained glass windows were an important feature of French Gothic architecture, particularly cathedrals and churches built between the 12th century and 16th century. While stained glass had been used in French churches in the Romanesque period, the Gothic windows were much larger, eventually filling entire walls. They were particularly important in the High Gothic cathedrals, most famously in Chartres Cathedral. Their function was to fill the interior with a mystical colored light, representing the Holy Spirit, and also to illustrate the stories of the Bible for the large majority of the congregation who could not read.

References

  1. 1 2 Collopy, Fred. "Color, Form, and Motion: Dimensions of a Musical Art of Light". Leonardo. 2000 (355): 355–356.
  2. Eskilan, Stephen. "Thomas Wilfred and Intermedia: Seeking a Framework for Lumia". Leonardo. 2003 (65): 65–68.
  3. 1 2 Museum of Modern Art. "Thomas Wilfred: Lumia" (PDF). moma.org. Retrieved 3 November 2014.
  4. Collopy, Fred. "Improvisational Lumia: Painting along with Musicians". Leonardo. 2001 (353): 353.