Painting Experience Research Articles

The Portraiture of Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1973)

This article presents a discourse on the relationship between Edvard Munch's painting and Peter Watkins' film-making practice. It does so through a close critical analysis of Watkins' still under-celebrated 1973 tele-film Edvard Munch. The tele-film provides rich insights into the connections between the practice and aesthetic experience of painting, and that of filmed material. Feathering media and aesthetic categories, the piece also makes use of original interview content with Peter Watkins.

Sztuka polska za granicą. Człowiek i cisza w przestrzeni malarskiej Roberta Bluja

This article is the first attempt in Polish literature to describe an artistic output of Robert Bluj, a Polish painter living and creating in Vilna. Saulė Mažeikaitė, an art critic, wrote, among the others, about the artist and his creations in Lithuanian field, emphasizing ‘space and figure’ as fundamental points of reference to Bluj’s painting. Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw influenced substantially on shaping his artistic workshop and subjects’ selecting. Young art student started his academic education in Marian Czapla’s studio. Next he gained experience in workshops of Rajmund Ziemski, Wiesław Szamborski and Edward Tarkowski. Warsaw Academy helped the artist to sense color temperatures and shaped his abilities to build a picture with colors. The form of Bluj’s artistic images became deeper, well defined, clear and more sophisticated in comparison with his pre-academic period. The painter systematically rejected unnecessary decorative effect and overloading. The area of Robert Bluj’s painting experience is close to climate and spirit of Polish neofigurative art. A man in Bluj’s pictures seems to be the most frequently lonesome and alienated – spiritually and physically separated from palpable reality, placed individually or in groups, in empty neutral space. Models of his compositions are recruited from among real persons found among Vilna inhabitants, although he does not try to paint individual portraits. In artist’s understanding, a model becomes an actor, who personates a role appointed by the painter. In majority of Bluj’s compositions, a man is placed in a clearly defined and even particular space. The background in his pictures is spatial, inspired by direct references to architecture. Many compositions include both – open space – in form of schematically outlined gates, doors or window openings, and closed interiors – suggesting a room or a balcony. It is also possible to find a horizon line, although it is not always ‘proper’ towards the foreground male or female figures. It is for Bluj a basic element of context situating the image figure comment. Frequently repeated element defining compositions’ spatial character consists of stones, scattered around surfaces of many images – the most often among human figures – composed synthetically and close to black or navy blue spots.

Modes of Address in Pictorial Art: An Eye Movement Study of Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Art-historical accounts of the last 200 years identify developments in the types, or “modes,” of address that a picture can present to a viewer as critical to the experience and evaluation of paintings. The authors focus on “anti-theatrical” theories of pictorial address and the complex and innovative “double relation” of absorption and acknowledgment introduced by the painter Edouard Manet. They report a case study of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère investigating expert and novice spectators' eye movements and utterances in response to the painting to find evidence that viewers seek resolution of the complex “double relation” that the theories describe.

Personal, Physical, Social, and Creative Contextual Design for Art Education

This paper proposes a Situation Design that designs not only the experience of behavior itself, but also the experience of the environment around the behavior. The research question of this paper is how to motivate children to paint. To find answers, we implemented an iPhone application. The app we came up with was The World Is Canvas; using it, one will be able to enjoy coloring based on a Situation Design. We adopted physical interaction, the function of which is to paint on the screen with fingers, as a design of a painting experience itself. We also adopted social interaction as a design of the environment around behavior, with the goal of offering fun. For social interaction, we adopted a mobile device with a network connection and a function to generate a draft for coloring by using a photo taken by the user. We conducted user evaluation tests on 111 children to analyze their user experience, and we demonstrated that they enjoyed themselves through these approaches.

Materialization of Story in Palau through the Experience of Carving and Painting

Materialization of Story in Palau through the Experience of Carving and Painting

Inside and out of painting

In this essay, the painter Paulo Pasta seeks to tell a story from within his own work; that is, from the forms he used as motivation of his painting, the author points to the main questions that made his experience. A relation mediated by the making, in which he seeks precisely to build a reflexive distance between the project and the real experience of painting.

Patient perceptions of an art-making experience in an outpatient blood and marrow transplant clinic

This study explored blood and marrow transplantation (BMT) patients' perceptions of an art-making experience during BMT treatment. Participants including patients receiving BMT for a variety of cancers (10 men/10 women, aged 20-68) were offered a 1 hour tile-painting activity during treatment. Participants with cognitive impairment and respiratory precautions were excluded from the study. Researchers followed immune precaution protocols for the safety of participants. Data were collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 participants to gather information about their perceptions of the art-making experience in a BMT clinic setting. Interview recordings were transcribed verbatim and analysed. Researchers coded transcripts independently and discussed outcomes together to achieve agreement on themes. Twelve themes emerged from the data, with the three most prevalent themes being Occupying Time (20.5%), Creative Expression (13.5%), and Reactions to Tile Painting (13.5%). Other themes included Support (12.2%), Side Effects (7.3%), Other Activities Suggested by Patients (7%), BMT Treatment Process (6.2%), Shared Painting Experience (5.9%), Life Outlook (5.2%), BMT Life Changes (3.8%), Spirituality (3%) and Barriers (1.9%). Through analysis of these themes, researchers have identified this art-making experience as a diversional or meaningful way to spend time during treatment, a medium for creative expression, and a distraction from negative side effects of the BMT process.

Intoxicated by My Illness: Artistic Expressions of Terminal Illness and Grief (323)

1.Compare and contrast the artists’ ideal patient-doctor relationship at the end of life.2.Discuss how the terminally ill person can use illness to reform and energize the self and community with artistic expressions.3.Discuss how suffering is both personal and universal. Three artists have captured the experience of dying and grief with their artistic expressions. Goethe has stated “seeds for the planting must not be grounded.” This became a revelation to Kathe Kollwitz with the loss of her son in World War I. Her grief provided important purpose and energy to her lithographs woodcuttings and sculptures. She said, “I do not want to go until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me until the last twig has grown.” Anatole Broyard, a literary critic, recorded his illness over course. His prose “Intoxicated by My Illness” expresses the creative force of terminal illness. “A critical illness is like a great permission and authorization or absolving. It's all right for a threatened man to be romantic even crazy if he feels like it. All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness but when you are sick you can let it out in all its garish colors.” Robert Pope died at age 35 from side effects of chemotherapy. He recorded his experience in painting. “One positive quality of cancer or any serious illness is the way it causes us to focus and consider priorities perhaps even for the first time.” This workshop will compare and contrast the artists’ ideal patient-doctor relationship at the end of life. We will discuss how the terminally ill person can use illness to reform and energize the self and community with artistic expressions. We will explore how suffering is both personal and universal. The prose of Broyard suggests psychological isolation from his support network. Broyard also makes strong recommendations about how caregivers should interact with patients. We will explore these recommendations as myth or reality. Finally, we will discuss the visual arts in grief and loss. Psychological and Psychiatric Aspects of Care; Spiritual, Religious, and Existential Aspects of Care; Cultural Aspects of Care

Perceptual, semantic and affective dimensions of experience of abstract and representational paintings

In this study the difference between representational and abstract paintings in judgments on perceptual, semantic and affective dimensions was investigated. Two groups of participants judged the sets of representational and abstract paintings on three groups of dimensions: perceptual (Form, Color, Space and Complexity), semantic (Illusion-Construction of Reality, Expression, Ideology and Decoration), and affective (Hedonic Tone, Arousal, Relaxation and Regularity). The results have shown that representational paintings have higher judgments on the perceptual dimensions of Form and Complexity, the semantic dimension of the Illusion of Reality (the opposite pole of the Construction of Reality), and the affective dimension of Regularity. On the other hand, abstract paintings have higher judgments on the perceptual dimension of Color, the semantic dimensions of Construction of Reality (the opposite pole of the Illusion of Reality) and Expression, and the affective dimension Arousal. A discriminant analysis indicated that all three sets of dimensions are relatively good predictors of the classification of representational and abstract paintings (61-100%). The results suggest that the subjective categorization of paintings is generally based on the recognizability of pictorial content (representational vs. abstract), but some formal or stylistic properties play a role in the categorization, as well: some expressionistic representational paintings were classified in an abstract category, and some geometrically abstract paintings were classified as representational.

Perceptual, semantic and affective dimensions of the experience of representational and abstract paintings

Perceptual, semantic and affective dimensions of the experience of representational and abstract paintings

French Women, Italian Art, and Other “Advocates of the Body” in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing

Displays of sanctified eroticism in The Minister's Wooing reveal Harriet Beecher Stowe's conviction that the body is inherently holy. The author's experience of religious paintings and her observation of French women in Europe deepened her belief that the female body is an instrument of spirituality, as can be traced in the novel.

Future Use: Abstract Painting

If means of communication are electronic, can painting be transmitted? If painting’s appearance is entirely available to the surface and timing of film, it can be photographed, and screened. But Lyotard proposes qualities in painting that present an alternative resource for visualisation, to be valued for their isolation from industrialised imaging. He enquires about the significant experience of painting’s visuality that is beyond photo‐visibility, but nevertheless communicable. Clement Greenberg finds the essence of painting’s communication lies in event‐full encounter with the generic specificity of painting itself, characterised by reciprocity of ‘at‐onceness’, that parallels the complex immediacy of visual experience in modernity. Roberts suggests another possibility: that the model of autonomy emerging from the consumption of painting may be communicated to other models of productive labour. This article accepts Roberts’s ethical questions about transmitting the conception of the painter’s ‘skilled hand’, but emphasises the social dimension of the opticality of painting’s surface.

Learning to look at paintings

Learning to Look at Paintings is an accessible guide to the study and appraisal of paintings, drawings and prints. Mary Acton shows how you can learn to look at and understand an image by analysing how it works, what its pictorial elements are and how they relate to each other. The book is illustrated with over ninety images by artists ranging from Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Botticelli to Picasso, Matisse and Rothko. It also includes a glossary of critical and technical terms used in art history. Learning to Look at Paintings is a highly accessible guide to the study and appraisal of paintings, drawings and prints. It provides a practical analysis of works of art through an understanding of the visual ingredients of composition, space, form, tone and colour. Mary Acton draws upon a varied collection of pictures, prints and drawings to demonstrate the skills required to better understand the visual experience of paintings. She discusses the subject matter and its meaning, the original function, the settting, the technique and the purpose of each picture and provides a vocabulary with which to discuss works of art. Illustrated with over ninety images of oil paintings, murals, frescoes, ceiling decorations, sketches and watercolours, Learning to Look at Paintings provides a critique of works of art dating from the early fifteenth century through to commentaries on modern installations and soft sculptures. Suggesting a series of questions to ask when looking at a painting and offering a comprehensive glossary of terms, this work will help develop a more structured, ordered and critical understanding of art.

Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting

Recent restoration campaigns, particularly to the Sistine Chapel, have focused attention on the importance of colour in our experience of paintings, but until recently it has been neglected by art historians. The author believes that the work of art can only be fully appreciated when it is regarded as the product of both the artist's hand and mind. This study utilizes the traditional sources, such as contemporary theoretical writings and iconographical analysis, but in addition draws on the scientific findings of the conservation laboratories. This is a new body of data assembled in large part since World War II, which art historians are only beginning to exploit to fill out the history of technique. Rather than writing merely a history of technique, however, the author has integrated this material with traditional approaches to cultural history. She undertakes to examine twenty major paintings of the period from Giotto to Tintoretto to elucidate how colour and technique contribute to their meaning. She gives us then, the first modern consideration of Renaissance paintings both as physical objects and as monuments of cultural history.

Understanding the Inarticulateness of Museum Visitors’ Experience of Paintings: A Phenomenological Study of Adult Non-Art Specialists

This paper is based on a study of museum visitors’ experience of paintings: in particular, the experience of adult non-art specialists. Phenomenology, a form of inquiry that seeks to articulate lived experience, provided the philosophical and methodological framework for the study. Descriptions and themes relating to the experience of paintings were generated from interviews conducted with eight participants. These themes were categorized into two major areas: the articulated aspects and the non-articulated aspects. The former refers to aspects that people can articulate when they describe their experience. For example, they talk about the formal qualities of paintings, related textual information, and the museum environment. The latter refers to aspects that people cannot articulate. For example, they have difficulty in expressing their feelings, their relationship with time, and an understanding of the role of the body. This paper focuses on the aspects that museum visitors cannot articulate when they describe their experience. This inarticulateness provides insights into certain overlooked features of the experience: the embodied nature of the experience, the way time is experienced, and the viewer’s feelings about paintings. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the study for art educators. It is suggested that teachers should prepare students in ways that will enable them to make use of their various cognitive, social and cultural frameworks in experiencing works of art.

Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (review)

Reviewed by: Manet and the Execution of Maximilian Ronald Paulson (bio) Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; catalogue by John Elderfield, 200 pp. The small but stunning exhibition that graced MoMA until the end of January 2007 focused on four major works of Edouard Manet, three eight-foot paintings and one small modello of The Execution of Maximilian (1867–69), from (in chronological order) the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery, London; the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; and the Kunstalle, Mannheim (hereafter referred to as Boston, London, Copenhagen, and Mannheim). They were Manet's most considered response to the question of modern "history painting"—how to adjust the grandest of painterly genres to contemporary experience, how to be Baudelaire's "painter of modern life,"of "the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent" moment. And the result proved dicey; Manet's paintings were not publicly shown until the twentieth century. There were no longer gods and heroes, but the French Emperor Napoleon III in 1861, noticing a struggle for power in a weak foreign country, and wishing to pursue empire in the New World, sent French troops to Mexico to establish order, followed in 1864 by a puppet ruler, demoted Emperor Maximilian (a young Hapsburg, a liberal idealist dedicated to democratic reform, brother of the reactionary Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria). The French troops met with unexpected resistance, indeed were defeated in battle, and Napoleon withdrew them, leaving Maximilian, we might say, holding the bag, to be executed by firing squad in 1867. All these emperors and a tragic denouement offered themselves as a suitably exalted subject for a history painting. I must declare an interest in the subject. There was a movie in 1939 called Juarez, which should probably have been called "Maximilian and Juárez" (Paul Muni was Juárez), but I remember it as "Maximilian and Carlotta." Brian Ahearn was Maximilian, with his curled bifurcated blond beard, elegant, aristocratic, and androgynous. The cathected image was the "emperor" Ahearn, with the fascinating beard, being shot by the firing squad, as in Marie Antoinette (a film of the year before) the "queen" (Norma Shearer) had been guillotined. Both images, I see looking back, drew on scenes of martyrdom that had entered the child's consciousness at an extremely early age with the Crucifixion (emperor and empress, king and queen, King of Kings). At that time there was a more public analogy: Maximilian and Carlotta and that other elegant but doomed pair, Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson. [End Page 164] The other figure in the movie was Napoleon III, beseeched by the Empress Carlotta (Bette Davis) to save her husband; Napoleon III was played by Claude Rains, who was shown at one point sitting on a hobby horse having his portrait painted riding a charger like the one his uncle rode in the painting by Baron Gros. (But I misremembered: It was the English ambassador who addressed the emperor on the hobby horse; Carlotta broke into a cabinet meeting.) The analogy employed by Manet in his paintings of the execution of Maximilian reflected French power politics of the 1860s. He came at the subject of Maximilian's execution graphically from his experience of Goya's painting of Spanish patriots shot down by a French firing squad, The Third of May, which he had seen on his visit to Madrid in 1865. His four major paintings of Maximilian's execution followed between 1867 and 1869. John Elderfield, in his exceptional catalogue for the MoMA exhibition, does not conceal the obvious relevance of the painting and the story to current events of the twenty-first century. For Paris there is Washington, for Mexico Iraq, and for the little Napoleon (nephew of the Great Napoleon) the younger President Bush. (He does not, but one must inevitably, recall Marx's reference to the younger Napoleon's coup as tragedy repeated as farce.) There is Napoleon III, "autocratic, often imprudent"; the French army's early control of central Mexico followed by the success of Juárez's guerilla forces; the inadequate military support, the number of dead soldiers and civilians, in particular the wasted deaths of French soldiers...

Perceptual dimensions of style in paintings

The main purpose of this study is to specify the basic perceptual dimensions underlying the judgments of the physical features which define the style in paintings (e.g. salient form, colorful surface, oval contours etc.). The other aim of the study is to correlate these dimensions with the subjective (affective) dimensions of the experience of paintings. In the preliminary study a set of 25 pairs of elementary perceptual descriptors were empirically specified, and a set of 25 bipolar scales were made (e.g. uncolored-multicolored). In the experiment 30 subjects judged 24 paintings (paintings were taken from the study of Radonjic and Markovic, 2004) on 25 scales. Factor analysis revealed the four factors: form (scales: precise, neat, salient form etc.), color (color contrast, lightness contrast, vivid colors), space (voluminosity, depth and oval contours) and complexity (multicolored, ornate, detailed). Obtained factors reflected the nature of the phenomenological and neural segregation of form, color, depth processing, and partially of complexity processing (e.g. spatial frequency processing within both the form and color subsystem). The aim of the next step of analysis was to specify the correlations between two groups of judgments: (a) mean judgments of 24 paintings on perceptual factors and (b) mean judgments of the same set of 24 paintings on subjective (affective) experience factors, i.e. regularity, attraction, arousal and relaxation (judgments taken from Radonjic and Markovic, 2005). The following significant correlations were obtained: regularity-form, regularity-space, attraction-form and arousal-complexity (negative correlation). The reasons for the unexpected negative correlation between arousal and complexity should be specified in further studies.

Respiratory symptoms and diseases among construction painters

To study the self-reported prevalence of respiratory symptoms and diseases among construction painters and estimate the potential risk for this group compared with a representative group of carpenters sharing the construction work environment but without significant exposure to paint. A questionnaire study was conducted on 1,000 male Finnish construction painters and 1,000 carpenters (mean response rate 60.5%). Symptoms and diseases of the respiratory tract were studied, by logistic regression modelling, in relation to occupation and duration of painting experience. Age, atopy and smoking habits were taken into account. The painters reported more asthma-like, rhinitis, laryngeal and eye symptoms than the carpenters [odds ratio (OR) 1.4-1.8]. The difference in the prevalence of asthma between the occupations was not statistically significant, but the painters with 1-10 years of painting experience had a threefold risk of asthma compared with the carpenters. Chronic bronchitis was linked to painting occupation [OR 1.9, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.2-3.0] and to the duration of exposure; OR (CI) for over 30 years of painting was 2.2 (1.2-4.0). Occupation was not associated with allergic rhinitis or conjunctivitis. The results indicate a higher risk for respiratory symptoms and chronic bronchitis among construction painters than among carpenters.

Art, Genius, and Racial Theory in the Early Nineteenth Century: Benjamin Robert Haydon

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) was one of the foremost historical painters of his day and believed passionately that he was the great hero-genius who was to lead the ‘British School’ of art to victory over its Continental rivals. This article considers his formulation and propagation of bioracist ideas around 1810 – and his repudiation of those ideas after being commissioned to paint the Worldwide Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 – in the context of his anxieties about his own genius and place in history, and of more commonly-shared concerns about Britain’s place in the world. For much of his career, Haydon held views in which a theory of how best to represent the heroic figure was intertwined with a belief in the existence of a fixed hierarchy of racial types. He used the new model of inherent racial difference between Europeans and Africans in order to efface older ideas of environmentally produced national difference between, for example, the British and the Ancient Greeks. Paradoxically, this was in the service of a vigorously nationalistic conception of British art. His repudiation of racial theory in 1840 did not lead to the weakening of this conception, because his experience of painting the Anti-Slavery Convention allowed him a different and more powerful way of affirming his status as an artist, and the noble future of British art and the British Empire. The fact that he had been chosen to depict an event which supposedly signified Britain’s spiritual superiority to the rest of the world, and a strong personal identification with the abolitionist hero Thomas Clarkson, led to a resurgence of Haydon’s faith in the divine inspiration that he thought marked him out as a great man engaged in a task of national importance. His views on racial difference changed because this faith became dependent in part on the rhetoric surrounding abolitionism, in particular a Christian universalist idea of race.

Droplet: A virtual brush model to simulate Chinese calligraphy and painting

This paper proposes a virtual brush model based on droplet operation to simulate Chinese calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting in real time. Two ways of applying droplet model to virtual calligraphy and painting are discussed in detail. The second droplet model is more elaborated and can produce more vivid results while being slightly more time-consuming. The novel feature of the proposed droplet virtual brush model successfully enables the simulation painting system to overcome the poor expressional ability of virtual brush based on particle system and avoids the complex evaluation of physical brush with solid model. The model, derived from the actual calligraphy and painting experience, due to the simplicity of the droplet operation and its powerful expressive ability, considerably improves the performance of the simulation system and maintains painting effect comparable with real brush by supporting special Chinese brush effect such as dry brush, feng and stroke diffusion.