Art at RMS

Participants in Nan’s Wednesday workshop dragged four large appliance boxes outside on Wednesday, Sept 10, to attempt to create cameras obscuras (plural from the Latin, according to “M”.) Could an image be projected inside the box, clear enough and focused enough to draw from? The sun danced in and out of the clouds, and the wind came up near the end of the session and closed it down, but the wondrous, magical upside-down and backward images appeared.
Workshop participants concluded that it is possible that this simple technology may have informed renaissance artists, but that more research and more experiments would be necessary to produce the sort of clear, focused images depicted in David Hockney’s book; Secret Knowledge. Practice and patience are also required to make a competent drawing from these projected images.
Upside-down, backward drawing of "R" by "N," drawn by tracing the projected image cast on the inside of an appliance box, created by light passing through a small "pinhole."