“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted September 14th, 2008)

The illustration shown today is of a "biker bar" made by Wendy Bivens, a well-known diorama artist in the Phoenix, Arizona area. The example shown is of a “biker” bar.

The design and production of dioramas is a specialized and (today) unusual art form. As is the case with all art, the artist chooses certain features of the subject to be represented, while other features are left out. Great skill is called for in such matters as posing the human figures and keeping the sizes of objects consisted.

From talking to Wendy, it’s clear that (at least so far) it’s hard to get rich by making dioramas, but it’s really intensely creative and just plain fun.

There was a time when dioramas were a major way in which museums illustrated subjects such as fashions or historical events; our own Desert Caballeros Museum here in Wickenburg has an entire room dedicated to dioramas showing the history of the region. In recent years, computer graphics (especially the kind done using “3-D modeling” software) have probably cut into the usage of dioramas, but there may be subtler force that also affects interest in them.

The force that I have in mind is a general decline in public interest in history. Although the example of Wendy’s work shown here does not portray any particularly famous event, it does capture the reality of a certain kind of human experience that is special to the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries. Given that people are (these days) usually extremely busy and are growing more and more accustomed to movies and television shows that make great use of computer graphics, “merely” representing reality seems to be somewhat out of fashion. Most people don’t seem to care whether something they see is realistic or not : consider, for example, the sets in recent Star Wars movies, or in the Harry Potter films. I strongly suspect that there are a lot of people who think that Hogwart’s School is a real place, because they can’t distinguish between fake and real scenery.

Dioramas are an art form in which the results are clearly not reality, but rather a representation of reality. This feature alone may make them very valuable in an era of declining common sense and good taste.

And this fact brings up something else: it is possible, using computer graphics, to portray impossible things, such as dinosaurs in outer space shooting flames out of their mouths to incinerate naked Playboy centerfolds. Dioramas don’t move (well, usually they don’t, anyhow), and there are some limits on what they can show. The over-use of computer graphics in many recent movies shows us one of the great commandments of art (and every other phase of life, come to think of it): just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.

My great thanks to Wendy Bivens; perhaps there will be future examples of Wendy’s art here on this site.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me