Physicist David Stork Articles and papers refuting Hockney's book "Secret Knowledge"

"I understand the constructed nature of art -- that artists are not photographers," David Stork. Although scholars have been happy to see Stork use science to bring about the demise of Hockney's theory, they've tended to view his work as confirmation of something they'd always insisted on, for all sorts of cogent historical reasons.

View article here

Stills from David Storks computational model calculating Diego Velasquez's painting Las Meninas was painted from life and not created through the use of the camera obscura that Velasquez projected onto a canvas and traced.

Inferring illumination direction estimated from disparate sources in paintings: An investigation into Jan Vermeer’s Girl with a pearl earring

"Stork and Johnson tested for the location of the illuminant, and thereby rejected the claim that an artist used projection optics when executing a particular painting....Our work has addressed the estimation of the direction of the illumination perpendicular to the line of sight; that is, this direction could be described by a single angle with respect to the horizontal."

View paper as PDF here

"Fidelity analysis of mechanically aided copying/enlarging of Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Niccolò" Albergati" By David Stork & Marco Duarte

View pdf here

2014 ADAM PORTRAIT AWARD WINNER

Congratulations to Henry Christian-Slane for winning the 2014 NZ portrait awards. I had the privilege of tutoring Henry in life drawing on the pictorial design program at the Auckland University of Technology; at the end of his degree Henry attended a realist workshop intensive painting course.