Masks in Sight and Sound: Exploring Music–Art Relationships through Crossmodal Aesthetic Responses

This paper examines a particular period in the art history of colonial Bengal where the transformations in the visual culture of Bengal stemmed primarily from the free percolation and circulation of the stylistic category of academic realism. It focuses on the dissemination of academic realism through the formal levels of teaching in art schools and more fully on the way this fluid category of realism with its range of new norms and techniques began to be adopted by local painters – who had no formal training in art – at the popular level of print production.

Background: Techniques from the visual arts, such as drawing, painting and sculpting, are regularly employed by music therapists without formal training in art therapy.Objective: This work is trying to evaluate which visual techniques are used by music therapists to which effect, and to compare these findings with standard methods in art therapy.Methods: Literature review and a survey among Austrian music therapists.Discussion: Contact between music therapists and art therapists is hardly established in Austria. Some music therapists went through specialized diagnostic training, concerning their patients’ images; others base their use of visual media on their own experience. Art therapists, on the other hand, possess detailed information and rich personal experience concerning the use of drawing and painting techniques to therapeutic ends.Conclusions: Visual media can play a valuable role in music therapy. Information about the possible effects of the employed techniques is strongly recommended.

Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun’s <i>Self-portrait</i>

Fechner's primary school revisited: Towards a social psychology of taste

The fast development of artificial intelligence turned visual storytelling into a more approachable, inclusive and participatory creative action. Historically, visual narratives were only done well by specialized artistic skills and costly equipment, and a barrier of experience in production that made visual media communication only available to a few. This can be minimized by AI-enhanced technologies like generative image models, style-transfer systems, multimodal storytelling systems, and automated editing pipelines which allow users with diverse backgrounds to tell captivating visual stories with more ease than ever before. They favor ideation, the structuring of narrative, composition of a scene, and aesthetic polishing, allowing individuals with no formal training in art to visualize themselves and experiment in a creative way. Also, since AI personalises visual content based on cultural and emotional subtexts and user-specific intentions, it creates more genuine and meaningful storytelling. It also facilitates usability with voice-to-image synthesis, user-friendly interfaces to creators with limited abilities and language-neutral narrative editors. AI promotes creative confidence in learning settings, which allows students to cycle quickly and visualize abstract ideas. On a societal level, AI democratizes the process by enabling marginalized groups to get new channels to conserve narratives, rebrand traditions, and recount lived experiences on the digital realms. Along with these developments, such aspects of ethics as authorship, originality, bias, and responsible deployment are also of critical importance. On the whole, AI is a radical power that broadens the range of creators, the format of stories, and those whose voices are heard within the visual storytelling system.

Background: Editorials speculate on the relationship between art and plastic surgery, and studies of limited art education in surgical training show intriguing benefits. Identifying the shared core concepts and skills in art and plastic surgery could advance incorporating artistic skills and concepts into plastic surgery training. Methods: We performed a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interview transcripts of 15 plastic surgeons and 15 artists using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Plastic surgeons were board-certified or board-eligible, and artists self-identified art as their primary occupation or had formal training in art with a degree. During the interviews, we used a constant comparison approach. We reviewed the initial transcripts to create a codebook at the sentence and/or paragraph level. Two members of the research team coded each transcript, and the codes were summarized into themes based on discussion among the team members. Results: 15 plastic surgeons aged 36-80 years and 15 artists aged 19-62 years with varying specialties and practices participated. We identified preliminary themes held in common. Both groups recognize that creativity played a major role. Both also recognized that strong technical foundational skills are key to developing competency. They described how technical skills, manual dexterity, and three-dimensional thinking can be taught and nurtured. While creativity was seen as innate, practitioners must push the boundaries of creativity through innovation to the limits of the profession. Both groups spoke about the “Elements of Art” and “Principles of Design” when describing their work: the surgeons understand this informally. Finally, artists and surgeons share the belief that hypersensitivity to one’s surroundings or to human features is important to identifying problems or ideas and that every action needs to have an intention and purpose. Conclusion: From this study, we are developing a framework describing core concepts and skills in plastic surgery training through an artistic lens. When establishing a curriculum, it is important to develop strong technical foundational skills while also encouraging fundamental knowledge that is used in art education. We believe plastic surgery training can be enhanced by centering education around creativity, hypersensitivity, and purposeful action.

ARTIST PROFILE—DAVID WHITE Drawing the Stories of Two Cultures Lee Ann Woods At first glance artist David White seems a study in dichotomy. He has no formal training in art, yet adeptly depicts rural mountain settings in pencil and ballpoint. He grew up in the city of Knoxville, but draws farm animals as though he has known their every curve and nuance since childhood. Even his name suggests a departure from the expected, for Mr. White is a Black man. Mr. White's art, however, is not about polarities. His works represent a blending, a hope for harmony between two cultures. David White is a large, talkative man with a friendly smile and graying, cropped hair. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with his family, which he calls his strength, and works in industrial painting and computer graphics at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Since elementary school he has been interested in drawing, but it wasn't until he was well into adulthood that Mr. White began creating images with pen and pencil. He first embarked upon his passion by fashioning cartoons, and later moved to drawing images from photographs, making calendars, and finally creating and selling prints. David White grew up in the 1960s f*. ~'..^¡^'¦'Jr——iin the mixed-race community of Mechanicsville in Knoxville, Tennessee. "We went to separate schools," Mr. White says of the children in his neighborhood, "but that didn't stop us from being friends." A white couple —, ..... , ,is^tr.wju. named Mr. and ™^^'*: **í¿ Mrs· Bel1 lived¦*?!/«-' behind Mr. White's family. "Mr. Bell taught my grandmother how to drive when she was 59," Mr. White recalls with a smile. 52«¿ÍS2S 1H The young David, his grandmother, and Mr. Bell would take drives together. Those experiences on the backcountry roads of East Tennessee, and his feelings of kinship with white friends influenced Mr. White's choice of subject matter. "I want to tell stories about [the two cultures] working together," he says, "stories that reflect community, and learning to help each other all along the way."'-fais— From an early age David White'/'JpW^* took an interest in Appalachia"_ —»¦'V«*^' culture, admiring the way that people created things from scratch.T^^^-^MW^^ * He tellshow'-¿^^4^r\ :-i [ y i ^g&lÈ-r he, as a young ,, 'Ml· '., >-\ V^' ??]\1 I]-T1*. 55 ...

Reviewed by: Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird by Armand Garnet Ruffo Albert Braz Armand Garnet Ruffo, Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2014. 320 pp. $32.95. Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise that the growing presence of indigenous people in Canadian cultural and academic life would not only add new perspectives to scholarly discourse but also challenge the very notion of what constitutes scholarship. This is certainly the case with Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird, a learned biography that does not include a single citation and tests the distinction between the factual and the fictive and the empirical and the mythical. An Anishnaabe from the northern Ontario town of Chapleau, Ruffo is a poet-academic who has made a reputation for himself primarily with biographical long poems about figures like the conservationist and nature writer Grey Owl, the Apache political leader Geronimo, and now the iconic Anishnaabe painter Morrisseau. His best known book is arguably Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney, in which Ruffo documents the relationship between the Englishman who pretended to be indigenous and his own family, the Espaniels. In terms of form, though, Grey Owl is a traditional text that borrows heavily from published biographies of the subject. However, this is not what Ruffo does in Norval Morrisseau, which is not only (mostly) in prose but also eschews empirically-based Western research methods in favour of an “Anishinaabe epistemology” (3) that embodies other ways of knowing. Ruffo makes his perspective explicit from the outset. He explains that the impetus for his study of Morrisseau was the 2005 invitation that he received from the art curator Greg Hill to produce a text for the catalogue of the National Gallery of Canada’s retrospective Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist. Since at the time Ruffo knew little about “the acclaimed Ojibway painter,” he pondered the offer and “waited. Waited for something to tell me either to take on the project or let it go” (1). That all changed one fateful night. While in bed, through “a combination of dreaming and remembering,” he thought he heard voices, voices that “had come from [End Page 241] the old flat-roof house of my childhood in the north. Perhaps from my mother and the neighbours who had dropped by for a visit, a chat, a drink” (1, 2). Upon reflecting on what he believed the voices had imparted to him, Ruffo deduced that Morrisseau’s “experiences, while extraordinary in their own right because of his unique gifts, were fundamentally connected to something larger than himself. I realized that Morrisseau’s life was representative of the profound upheaval that had taken place in the lives of Native people across the country” (2). Consequently, the significance of the painter’s achievement could only be captured from an Anishinaabe “mythic worldview” (5), which is what Ruffo proceeded to do. In his book, Ruffo traces the life and career of Norval Morrisseau, Copper Thunderbird (circa 1932 to 2007), from his birth in an isolated Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, through his emergence as the founder of the Woodlands School of art, to his apotheosis as one of Canada’s most celebrated artists. Since Morrisseau had no formal training in art, many critics have been perplexed by his achievement. Ruffo, however, has a culturally-informed explanation: Morrisseau is a shaman-artist. In fact, he is not only a shaman-artist but comes from a long line of shaman-artists. As Ruffo has the painter explain to a client, “ ‘All the pictures that you bought from me are taken from the dreams of my grandfather.’ ” Or as Ruffo elaborates, “Whatever good fortune [Morrisseau] has he credits to his grandfather, Potan, the man who raised him in a world of manitous and demigods” (64). Ruffo goes so far as to state that by the time Morrisseau has his major success in the early 1960s, he “firmly believes that he is a born artist and cannot learn his kind of painting from anyone—as the sacred drum arises from the earth, his paintings arise from the old stories, and he is merely the instrument of their creation...

We investigated whether individuals with training in the visual arts show superior performance on geometric reasoning tasks, given that both art and geometry entail visualization and mental manipulation of images. Two groups of undergraduates, one majoring in studio art, the other majoring in psychology, were given a set of geometric reasoning items designed to assess the ability to mentally manipulate geometric shapes in two- and three-dimensional space. Participants were also given a verbal intelligence test. Both training in the arts and verbal intelligence were strong predictors of geometric reasoning, but training in the arts was a significant predictor even when the effects of verbal intelligence were removed. These correlational findings lend support to the hypothesis that training in the visual arts may improve geometric reasoning via the learned cognitive skill of visualization.

This interdisciplinary and autoethnographic PhD by creative project examines the experience of halted suicide on the part of the researcher, an “invisible woman” raised to set aside her wants to satisfy others’ needs. The inquiry examines the researcher’s engagement with artmaking in order to manage her ongoing suicidality and analyses some of her resulting artworks, which might be described as examples of “Outsider art”. Drawing on perspectives from philosophy, theology, psychology, art therapy and the interdisciplinary field of narrative studies, the project identifies three key factors pertinent to the researcher’s experience of halted suicide and subsequently managing suicidality. The first is the role of spirituality and the experience of epiphany or “prophetic call”. The second is a “narrative of the imagined future”. This refers to the need for people experiencing suicidality to make use of the imaginative resources generated by their depression to create a new story about their future self and life. The third factor is “radical courage”, a term adapted from the philosopher Jonathan Lear’s notion of “radical hope”. This refers to a steadfast, resolute determination to choose life over death, and to move towards the realisation of an alternative future in concrete, moment-by-moment ways. Art-making services a number of roles in this doctoral project. In the first place, the researcher uses a series of artworks as autoethnographic sources. These chiefly take the form of watercolours and collages, most produced in visual diaries with the aim of recording states of mind and being over time. Those works produced before the doctoral project began have been subjected to close analysis in order to provide details of the researcher’s subjective experience, and thus evidence of her autoethnographic findings. The researcher has also produced a body of work during this project as a form of autoethnographic inquiry in its own right. In this case, she has consciously explored concepts in visual form and subjected the resulting images to techniques of visual analysis with the aim of deepening her autoethnographic insights. In addition, to this art-making, the researcher has produced a body of paintings exhibited to the public. The purpose here has been to communicate her findings in visual form, supplementing and providing an alternative to the discussion in this thesis. The exhibited paintings also provide a reflexive demonstration of the process of imagining a new, future-oriented self-narrative and then exercising the courage required to bring it into life whilst also explaining how the three key factors mentioned above are layered together in the works. The value of this doctoral project lies firstly in demonstrating the value of first-person and autoethnographic accounts for understanding suicidality, particularly those from “invisible women” whose perspectives remain under-represented in sociological and psychological literature. The project draws attention to another under-researched topic: the relationship between spirituality and the ability to halt a suicide. The project emphasises the power of imagining a new future-oriented self-narrative, and the courageous process involved in bringing that imagined narrative into being through small, incremental actions in the present. Art-making practices are also explored, particularly those by people with no formal art training who produce “Outsider art”. Finally, in using artwork and techniques of visual analysis in multiple ways, the project has value for those interested in the multi-faceted and unconventional methods associated with art-based ethnographic inquiry.

Aesthetics play a vital role in the celebration of Akwantukese festival. In the course of the festival celebration, several visual art forms are seen and these art forms give aesthetic value to observers. The aesthetic value associated to the visual art forms in the festival can aid people acquire knowledge and satisfaction. Yet, very few people actively participate in the celebration and do a critical observation of these visual art forms. The study is therefore aimed at focusing the aesthetic values of the visual art forms in the Akwantukese festival celebration. The objective(s) of the study are: (i)to identify the visual art forms embedded in the festival celebration. (ii)to describe the visual art forms and bring out their aesthetic values. Phenomenology and descriptive methods under qualitative research approach was employed in this study. The purposive sampling technique was used to select 30 respondents for the research and the main research instruments used for data collection were interviews and observations. The results indicate that there are a lot of visual art forms seen in Akwantukese festival celebration that have aesthetic values and can be appreciated by all and sundry. The research concludes that some of the art forms used during the festival celebration have philosophical and symbolical meanings that express emotions such as happiness, dreadfulness, sadness and others. It is therefore recommended that the chiefs and the people of New Juaben Traditional area should try as much as possible to fully participate in the festival celebration in order to see the various visual art forms and appreciate their aesthetic values. Again the festival should be made attractive to the international communities in order to promote tourism. Keywords: Aesthetic values, art forms, performing art, Akwantukese festival, visual art, celebration DOI: 10.7176/ADS/80-04 Publication date: January 31st 2020

A COMPOSER’S JOURNEY ON THE ROAD TO MECCA CHRIS VAN RHYN HE FOLLOWING DIARY ENTRY by the present author provides the biographical context of the essay that follows: My first introduction to the village of Nieu-Bethesda in South Africa’s Great Karoo region was during a family holiday in June 1998. At my mother’s suggestion, we visited Helen Martins’s Owl House of which I had never heard. My lack of expectation, coupled with the openness characteristic of an optimistic late-teenage sensibility not yet tainted by life experience, provided for a profound experience. The air was stale and tangibly thick with an energy of deep sadness caught in the colored milled glass walls and glass panes, wire, numerous cement statues of owls (amongst other things) and a collection of kitsch art and knick-knacks inside the house. The often grotesque and surreal statues in the so-called Camel Yard (Example 2), Helen’s “Mecca,” begged to be relieved from their claustrophobia and never-ending journey East. In August 2013 I returned, hoping to relive my previous experience. Perhaps owing to an underlying cynicism cultivated over fifteen years, the result of expectation, or the commercialization (and resultant T 68 Perspectives of New Music sanitization), of Martins’s space that had since taken place, I was unable to re-conjure the experience. With envy I watched children running through the yard, shrieking and pointing at Martins’s creations. All I could do was attempt a re-composition in music of what I now saw as having been a spiritual encounter. It was my reading in 2012 of Athol Fugard’s play on the life and work of Helen Martins (The Road to Mecca, 1984)1 that first prompted me to revisit Nieu-Bethesda. Although my music composition, The Road to Mecca for piano (2014), takes its name from this play, it was my first-hand visual encounter with Helen Martins’s landscape and the spiritual impact it had on me that inspired its conception. This work was first performed at the North-West University Conservatory Hall in Potchefstroom, South Africa, in August 2014. It received its American première at Harvard University’s John Knowles Paine Concert Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 2015. This paper traverses the road between cultural geography, visual arts, and music composition in its theoretically speculative exploration of the possibilities for translating into music the spiritual in a landscape—the experience of transcendence, that which goes beyond human knowledge and reason. HELEN MARTINS AND LANDSCAPE Helen Elizabeth Martins was born in Nieu-Bethesda in December 1897, where she also spent her childhood as one of six children. According to Ross (1997, 25), Helen was named after a deceased older sister and was therefore “manifestly linked with death right from the start of her life.” The Jungian analyst Vera Bührman believes that “‘replacement children’ . . . carry the fantasies of the mother [and] never form the identity of an integrated person” (Ross 1997, 25). After a brief marriage and spending time elsewhere in South Africa, she returned to Nieu-Bethesda in the 1930s to take care of her ill mother and father who died in 1941 and 1945, respectively. Some time after this she began to transform her home and yard into a work of art2 with the help of a range of men who physically executed the pieces. Koos Malgas, who assisted Martins during the last twelve years of her life, was “the finest craftsman-cum-artist of the three.”3 Neither Helen nor any of her assistants had any formal art training (Ross 1997, 16). In addition to the milled glass that were added to almost every surface, walls were broken down or built, and windows were inserted. The cement statues in the yard were accompanied by perspex suns, moons. A Composer’s Journey on the Road to Mecca 69 and stars (Ross 1997, 15). The Dutch Reformed Church played a central role in the village by its influence on the lives of the inhabitants —doubting its teachings would have been unacceptable. Martins grew to reject most of the religious, moral, and social norms associated with the church.4 Villagers grew suspicious of...

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), a poet, writer, novelist, playwright, composer, philosopher and educator, was the first Asian individual to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for his book Gitanjali. Although he did not receive any formal training in art, at a late stage of his life, when he was over sixty years old, he took up painting. He started by doodling on the pages of his poetry manuscripts. He left over two thousand paintings and drawing, deeply rooted in fantasy. He did not seem to follow a particular style or school of painting, neither eastern nor western. Tagore’s paintings are unique and his contribution to the art of India remains very important till today.

discipline, intrinsically and extrinsically. While an intuitive mode and a philosophical stance that promoted creativity and self expression for their own sake was a natural and seemingly easy attitude for art educators to adopt in the 1960s and early '70s, the economic and social realities of the 1980s necessitate a different approach. In 1975, a cursory glance at Canadian art education indicated that it flourished in an utopian landscape. The relatively short history of growth in Canadian art education (MacGregor, 1979) indicates that in less than thirty years, dedicated professionals created a climate in which visual arts became a respected subject that encourages imaginative and holistic thinking. In 1955, C. D. Gaitskell became the first president of The Canadian Society for Education Through Art. As a result of his efforts, bringing together art educators from the provinces, visual arts education acquired a national forum. In the expansionist period that followed, the characteristics of Canadian art education became more diverse. New curricula were developed to accommodate avant garde attitudes in visual art forms such as video, film, and photography. Programs expanded and diversified as money became available to purchase expensive equipment and build the elaborate facilities which seemed necessary to support participation and learning in contemporary visual arts studies. Aspiring artists increasingly turned to established degree programs to receive academic and professional training. Rifts between the professional artist and art educator narrowed as artists

Background: Over the past three decades, there has been a 900% increase in the number of women experiencing incarceration in Minnesota. We wished to test whether handwriting, as creative visual art expression for women in jail, would be a positive experience for them as well as for individuals viewing the artwork during expositions.Methods: Over a 2-year period, the principal artist invited women residents from four separate county jails in Minnesota, to handwrite their thoughts on a sheet of paper. Two hundred twenty-three women residents participated in the artist-led handwriting/visual art sessions and gave permission to use their authentic script, anonymously, for presentation in a 3-D visual art form. At the conclusion of the sessions, a survey was offered at each venue, which asked three questions relative to the participation in the handwriting art project: (1) Did it have a positive impact on me? (2) Would you recommend it to other women who are incarcerated? (3) Do you want to participate in more projects such as this during your incarceration? The resulting artwork of more than 1,000 sculptures, each exhibiting a portion of the women's original script, was displayed at several public showings and a survey was offered at each venue, which asked: (1) Did the exhibition increase awareness of mass incarceration of women? (2) Did it help the viewer see women who are incarcerated? (3) Did it make the viewer realize that action is needed to reduce incarceration of women? Survey questions were graded from 1 to 5, with a sliding scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.Results: The impact of this project of art activism has been very positive on both participants and the larger audience. The vast majority of women residents responding to the survey either agreed or strongly agreed that their participation in the project (1) had a positive effect on them (94%), (2) would recommend it to other incarcerated women (94%), and (3) would want to participate in more projects such as this (93%). A total of 425 surveys were collected among the audience at several sites: the law school (N = 87), open studios (N = 268), and a public library (N = 62). The vast majority of individuals responding to the survey either agreed or strongly agreed that the exhibited work (1) increased awareness of the problem (93%), (2) showed the humanity behind the script (88%), and (3) suggested that interventions were needed to address the problem (86%).Conclusions: Women under incarceration in county jails, who participated in a visual art handwriting program, as part of a collaborative visual art project led by principal artist, found great value in the sessions and agreed that such programs should be available to other women in detention. The overwhelming majority of the audience of the resulting exhibitions in public venues strongly agreed that interventions are needed to address the mass incarceration of women in Minnesota, suggesting the importance of art as a vehicle for increasing awareness about social problems and perhaps social change.