A concise SL History of Art

Walking through SL is sometimes like walking through the landscape of some medieval icon. These paintings in their early stages create extremely stylized landscapes, some in very bright colors. Although the perspective doesn't at all follow mathematical logic, the emptiness of space is almost tangible. Just this emptiness is what one encounters al the time in Second Life. People in icons seem to fly, and trees are done individually and in great detail. The drawings are very sharp, the edges clear cut.
Later on in their more baroque style of for example the 17th century the icons get more dark, green-brown colored, and the atmosphere becomes dense, the contours are fading away. Even perspective becomes more regular. But strange enough, these icons seem te be much further away from the imagery of Second Life. Indeed the atmosphere is so stressed, and just that is missing in the virtual world.

These observations made Five think about the styles of art that well fitted for SL and the styles that will never be reached in the 3D-world representations which are nowadays available. Of course within the broad sweep of a style, exceptions are found, and even within the works of one individual painter one finds a large variety of approaches.

So are there other styles to be found which approximate the way SL looks at the moment. Five thinks of Caravaggio and his followers: stark light-dark contrasts, sometimes heavy perspective and bright colors. The renaissance in its discovering of a logically constructed perspective is of course almost to easy to connect with the perspectives of the SL world. Michelangelo with his clear drawings fits in very well, but he as a sculptor is thinking only about space and its effects. Leonardo da Vinci is more difficult as far as his paintings are concerned. These portraits display persons in great detail and mysterious inner world, and together with the blurred landscape in the background, it lifts itself totally from the "primitiveness" of Second Life.


On the contrary, the great Flamish painters represent just the opposite: Rubens and van Dijck, in their enormous paintings will never be approached by the imagery of the virtual world. Densely filled spaces, blurred contours, complex lighting and colors are all packed in a dominating composition which creates a great unity in the surface of the painting. The viewer is not able to move anymore in this space. Rembrandt organizes the surface otherwise, but with his thick paint and just enough superbly conceived light directions to create his famous inner worlds he also is far from the spaces found in SL. Neither, of course the impressionists, but then again the Russian constructivists, beginning of the 20th century, indeed it seems they “are” already Second Life.
The have this clear-cut ideas and concepts, the functional no-non-sense design of everything in SL. And the colors of Mondrian, his light, his straight edges are really as if he already dreamt of Second Life. Bigger canvases tend to me more blurred, although there are some beautiful very small paintings too. The landscape and whole imagery of Second Life is then more like a drawing at the moment, a drawing in fine lines and the colors mostly following the shapes. Wild painting tends to leave the form behind, the colors spread all over the surface, mingle and the space is neither open, nor rectangular anymore. These kinds of styles can be compared with the textures one sees in Second Life, for instance the graffiti in subways and in hidden underground places.


The cubists really form a problem for this reasoning. In its idea it should be at the side of Second Life, but in its appearance the space they create is not accessible at all. And besides that the cubists are applying the technique of spreading out their colors, so even more attacking the crystal clear imagery of open space.

Painting nowadays has a scattered global style, but the main feeling is dreamlike, with techniques coming from child paintings, heavy use of paints in it’s material form, so this will never apply to the virtual computer screen world. The style attacks the normal shapes and forms being in protest against the too rational world we live in according to these painters. The surrealistic legacy is strong and not to be fitted with SL, although some aspects of fantasy, coming from Science-fiction can be connected to the not so human shapes some avatars are taking on.


Illumination in a book of Gaston Phebus, Count de Foix of France.
Icon of the Holy Transfiguration
Rubens, Saint -Georg
Malevitsj, The woodcutter
Franz Marc