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Ballooning over the
Masai Mara
Watercolour and Photoshop™
©1996 Charlene Brown
The hot air balloon is
not the concept I’m talking about here… although Leonardo daVinci probably had
such a thing in his vast repertoire of ideas.
Rather, I’m using this Photoshopped painting to illustrate Renaissance artists’ understanding of the concept of infinity and the use of vanishing points and the visualization of depth using shadows.
This seems to have preceded by hundreds of years the realization by scientists such as Descartes that space is infinite.
Incidentally, I had some difficulty determining the directions of the sensational early-morning shadows in composing this picture using the dozens of photographs I’d taken from the balloon. They were a little easier to figure out after I realized that they all extended toward a vanishing point at eye level. And because we were in a balloon, eye-level was slightly above the horizon…
