Animating the Past: The Secret of Kells

One of those maxims they tell you in art fundamentals courses in university is that drawing or painting isn’t just the technical aspects of arranging a medium on paper but is also a way of seeing. The way light falls on an object, the spatial relationships in a scene, the perspective, the texture, all cast a-slant so you can recognize how to translate three dimensional space onto a two dimensional surface.

Let me extend that–in studying the dominant modes of artistic expression throughout hi...