Think… 1970s, England. The Blue Hour… that time of suspended animation between pub lunchtime drinking hours and the reopening for pub evening drinking hours. I am relieved to report that common sense has since prevailed – now all-day imbibing is available!
Keen photographers on the other hand, carefully calculate the Blue Hour – those 20 odd minutes when the sun is just below the horizon and the light is particularly blue. For the curious, a Blue Hour calculator can be found at http://www.bluehoursite.com, and an iOS App is also available!
The deep green reflections on the right caught my eye the other evening in downtown Melbourne. At first glance, I thought I was seeing a miniature version of a building - a convincing optical illusion.
Not what I expected to find deep in rural Victoria. This bold beauty sits in Kongwak, a small Gippsland hamlet with a population of less than 200 souls.
Rubin face or the figure-ground vase is a famous set of ambiguous or bi-stable two-dimensional forms developed around 1915 by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. (Just what you were dying to find out!)
I spent some time in Photoshop fiddling with this image to get the illusion to work – take too much away, or not enough, and it falls apart. I’m quite chuffed with the final result!
When I found this scene, the Russian born American artist Mark Rothko came to mind. The distinct colour palate, the way this window has been constructed and placed low on the wall conjured up memories of his mid 1950’s paintings.
“I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.” – M. Rothko