Original Artwork Research Articles

Man on the Mound: Pictures of a Pitcher in Pain.

Description Atraumatic ball thrower's humerus fracture is an uncommon, and poorly understood injury pattern. The majority of these cases are seen in untrained and younger individuals. A missed diagnosis could severely impact a patient's quality of life, as management is operative in most cases. Here, we present the case of a young patient, suffering an atraumatic "ball thrower's" fracture. We present images of this exceedingly rare injury pattern and showcase original artwork with a proposed mechanism of injury.

RGB Color Model: Effect of Color Change on a User in a VR Art Gallery Using Polygraph.

This paper presents computer and color vision research focusing on human color perception in VR environments. A VR art gallery with digital twins of original artworks is created for this experiment. In this research, the field of colorimetry and the application of the L*a*b* and RGB color models are applied. The inter-relationships of the two color models are applied to create a color modification of the VR art gallery environment using C# Script procedures. This color-edited VR environment works with a smooth change in color tone in a given time interval. At the same time, a sudden change in the color of the RGB environment is defined in this interval. This experiment aims to record a user's reaction embedded in a VR environment and the effect of color changes on human perception in a VR environment. This research uses lie detector sensors that record the physiological changes of the user embedded in VR. Five sensors are used to record the signal. An experiment on the influence of the user's color perception in a VR environment using lie detector sensors has never been conducted. This research defines the basic methodology for analyzing and evaluating the recorded signals from the lie detector. The presented text thus provides a basis for further research in the field of colors and human color vision in a VR environment and lays an objective basis for use in many scientific and commercial areas.

The Little Book of Trees

From the publisher: Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile any nature lover. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with color photographs and original color artwork, The Little Book of Trees is an accessible and enjoyable mini-reference about the world’s trees, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics—from tree anatomy, diversity, and architecture to habitat and conservation. It also includes curious facts and a section on trees in myths, folklore, and modern culture from around the world. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing lives of trees.

Another piece of the puzzle: identifying the main patron of the great altarpiece of the Passion in Sibiu (Hermannstadt/Nagyszeben, Romania)

The altarpiece of the Passion of Christ preserved in the Evangelical church in Sibiu, created in 1519 by a skilful artist, Simon Pictor, using extensively the prints of Dürer and Altdorfer, represents one of the most spectacular surviving artworks of the Renaissance in Transylvania. Its subsequent transformation in 1545 and 1701 certainly enhanced its historical significance. The restoration of the artwork in the 1980s brought back to light very significant details: the dating of the original artwork (1519), two coats of arms hinting to the patronage, and a part of the genuine style of master simon. The identification of the sinister coat of arms, thus the one in the inferior heraldic position, as belonging to Johannes Lulay (royal judge and administrator of the royal mint of Sibiu) constituted the basis of extensive incursions in the patronage of this remarkable altarpiece. However, an important question remained unsolved: who could have been the other patron or commissioner of the altarpiece? As the preeminent position of the coat of arms (on the heraldic dextra) clearly indicates, this was an individual even higher in the hierarchy as Johannes Lulay himself.The assumption of the study is that this prominent patron was Paulus de Tomor/Tomori Pál. He remained in the Hungarian national consciousness as the heroical leader of the army in the „Mohácsi csata” of 29 August 1526, a critical turning point in the history of the state. This study contributes to the reveal of parts of his “Transylvanian biography,” his allegiances and political network in situ before he left the region, his patronal endeavours, and last, but not least, it discloses his real (and tinctured) coat of arms. At the same time, the great altarpiece of the Passion in Sibiu recovered another piece of its complex content, by the identification of the main patron (or, rather, the more honourable patron) in the person of Paulus de Tomor. Last, but not least, this study asserts that three of the characters depicted in the scene of the Lamentation over the dead Christ on the predella are in fact crypto-portraits of Johannes Lulay, his wife Clara Thabiassy, and his partner and superior Paulus Tomori.

TREND OF INFLUENCE AS APPROPRIATION IN DESIGN

The ability to identify beauty directs designers to appreciate the artworks around them and also to get inspired from them. Designers often get influenced by surroundings, other art forms, nature, philosophy etc. The concept of influence can be seen in the artworks/products since long time. In this process, many times designers are influenced by other artworks or use an existing element in their creation.Using the existing elements to make a new design with new context is called as „Appropriation‟. It has two ways. First it changes the interpretation of artworks. In other words one can say it reframes the original artwork without eliminating its aesthetics. The second way is where designers use the elements in a way which deviates from its original intent. This trend can be seen in modern art and Design.Since appropriation allows new context and meaning to designs, it opens new ways for interpretation. Borrowing other elements from different cultures increases the chances of appreciation of new designs globally. It has its pros and cons. Influence and appropriation in the field of design is more common and AI is also probably used for that. The purpose of thisstudy is to pinpoint how influence and appropriation has affected the trends in art/design. Primary and secondary data will be used for this study. Mix method along with grounded theory will be used for this study. This study is focused on the consequences of it hence it aims to identify challenges in adopting appropriation and aesthetical influence of it on viewers. To conclude appropriation as influence may be seen through the lenses of evolution wherein some inherited qualities may retained and modified or re-contextualize according to newer environment to adapt the design trends and function successfully.

ConvSRGAN: super-resolution inpainting of traditional Chinese paintings

Existing image super-resolution methods have made remarkable advancements in enhancing the visual quality of real-world images. However, when it comes to restoring Chinese paintings, these methods encounter unique challenges. This is primarily due to the difficulty in preserving intricate non-realistic details and capturing comple semantic information with high dimensionality. Moreover, the preservation of the original artwork’s distinct style and subtle artistic nuances further amplifies this complexity. To address these challenges and effectively restore traditional Chinese paintings, we propose a Convolutional Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network for Chinese landscape painting super-resolution, termed ConvSRGAN. We employ Enhanced Adaptive Residual Module to delve deeply into multi-scale feature extraction in images, incorporating an Enhanced High-Frequency Retention Module that leverages an Adaptive Deep Convolution Block to capture fine-grained high-frequency details across multiple levels. By combining the Multi-Scale Structural Similarity loss with conventional losses, our ConvSRGAN ensures that the model produces outputs with improved fidelity to the original image’s texture and structure. Experimental validation demonstrates significant qualitative and quantitative results when processing traditional paintings and murals datasets, particularly excelling in high-definition reconstruction tasks for landscape paintings. The reconstruction effect showcases enhanced visual fidelity and liveliness, thus affirming the effectiveness and applicability of our approach in cultural heritage preservation and restoration.

A new canvas of learning: Enhancing formal analysis skills in AP art history through AI-generated Islamic art

This study explores the use of AI art generators to enhance formal analysis skills in AP Art History students, with a focus on Islamic Art and Architecture. Students, often entering the course with high academic achievements, find the unique challenge of articulating detailed visual descriptions of artworks. The study’s approach involves using AI image-generation websites, like wepik.com, where students create AI images resembling Islamic artworks studied in class. This method aims to refine their descriptive skills, focusing on visual evidence rather than relying on identifying details. The choice of Islamic Art, markedly different from other historical periods covered in the curriculum, is intended to boost retention and learning engagement. The results show that students were more successful in describing architectural artworks compared to two-dimensional narrative pieces, with limited site access and the need for iterative description refinement being key challenges. Successful attempts were marked by precise vocabulary usage and detailed descriptions, resulting in AI images closely matching the original artworks. In contrast, less successful attempts revealed deficiencies in comprehensive and detailed descriptions, particularly in narrative artworks. These outcomes highlight the potential and limitations of AI tools in art history education, suggesting that their effectiveness depends largely on the depth and precision of student inputs. The study not only demonstrates the innovative application of AI in education but also underscores the importance of detailed visual analysis, pointing towards future enhancements in AI-assisted educational methodologies.

Artwork’s Authenticity Recognition Model Using Machine Vision and Applications

This paper presents an artwork authenticity recognition model using machine vision, image processing, and a fuzzy interface system and it is an applied research category. Artworks have always been subject to copying due to their importance, uniqueness, and great financial value, and it has always been the focus of international counterfeiters worldwide. Throughout history, due to various incidents, artworks have been stolen, crossed the borders of different countries, and traded in various auctions. Therefore, recognizing and confirming an artwork's authenticity is always challenging. In this research, I try to present a model to verify the authenticity of artwork using artificial intelligence techniques. The basic assumption is that a quality image of the original artwork is available with the specifications that I will explain in the section. Indeed, two images will be compared by taking pictures of other samples, and their differences will be identified with high accuracy, which the human eye cannot recognize. So, this model cannot recognize artwork authenticity without imaging history. In other words, photographing the original artwork can be used as a basis for comparison with other fake copies of it in the future, and by using the proposed model, their authenticity can and will always be checked. This model is based on my previous research on micrographics imaging to Industrial parts change recognition, the details of which will be explained in the text of the article. In this research, seven unique and famous world artworks were used and two samples of their images were compared to the original sample. The validity and reliability of the results and the high accuracy were obtained with one pixel.

Icons of the Nursing Virgin in Fifteenth-Century Ethiopia

The oldest known extant Ethiopian panel painting is Fəre Ṣəyon’s Nursing Virgin with Saints Stephen, Peter, and Paul (ca. 1434–68), preserved at the Monastery of Daga Ǝsṭifanos. As I argue, this novel subject matter for Ethiopian religious culture emerged in light of Emperor Zärˀa Yaˁqob’s introduction of the cult of the Virgin Mary in 1441 and Giyorgis of Sägla’s writings, which drew upon translations of early medieval Egyptian and late ancient Syrian texts. Numerous adaptations of Fəre Ṣəyon’s panel prove its long-lasting impact in fifteenth century sacred art as an original and influential Ethiopian artwork in its own right.

X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis of Historic Art Paint Pigments

Utilizing synchrotron radiation, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) microscopy enables researchers to deduce the elemental composition of paint pigments with a higher sensitivity and resolution than that of lab-based XRF instruments. With this information, art historians can date paintings by examining the elemental makeup of paint pigments and the time periods in which they were used. One painting, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, has been duplicated by Pieter Brueghel the Younger and other artists, leading to confusion over which artworks are Brueghel masterpieces or copies by other artists. Art historian Maurizio Seracini, retaining a painting that could be assigned to Brueghel, confirmed the artwork was a reproduction not created by Brueghel. With radiocarbon dating, Dr. Seracini discovered that the painting was created between 1679 and 1939, after Brueghel’s death in 1638. Dr. Seracini also employed X- ray imaging to differentiate between the painting’s visible and lower layers. This technique uncovered a seated woman within the artwork’s lower layers, indicating that the artist has painted over the original artwork. Substantiating Dr. Seracini’s findings, the sub-µm spatial resolution of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL’s) Submicron Resolution X-ray Spectroscopy (SRX) beamline was used to conduct an XRF microscopy analysis on a paint fragment from the artwork. The software PyXRF was used to identify elements based on emission spectra, contributing to the discovery of titanium within the painting. The presence of titanium, an element incorporated into paint pigments starting in 1921, indicates that the artwork may be more modern than previously thought. These results illustrate the applicability of synchrotron radiation in characterizing the physical and chemical properties of cultural heritage artifacts, supporting historians in their quests to discover the stories behind these objects.

Photography and the diasporic condition. A travel in the writer Sabyl Ghoussoub’s family photographs

Abstract “The contributions in this series explore the migration experience using different kinds of ‘data.’ Our contributors use works of art, novels, songs, and movies to explore many of the same questions they generally ask in their social scientific research. What additional insights come from using arts and culture to think through the issues that concern us? What can images and notes reveal that scholarly work cannot? We also invite original stories, poems, photo essays or art works. Ideas for contributions are wholeheartedly invited at any time. Please contact Marie Godin or Peggy Levitt”.

Synthetic images aid the recognition of human-made art forgeries.

Previous research has shown that Artificial Intelligence is capable of distinguishing between authentic paintings by a given artist and human-made forgeries with remarkable accuracy, provided sufficient training. However, with the limited amount of existing known forgeries, augmentation methods for forgery detection are highly desirable. In this work, we examine the potential of incorporating synthetic artworks into training datasets to enhance the performance of forgery detection. Our investigation focuses on paintings by Vincent van Gogh, for which we release the first dataset specialized for forgery detection. To reinforce our results, we conduct the same analyses on the artists Amedeo Modigliani and Raphael. We train a classifier to distinguish original artworks from forgeries. For this, we use human-made forgeries and imitations in the style of well-known artists and augment our training sets with images in a similar style generated by Stable Diffusion and StyleGAN. We find that the additional synthetic forgeries consistently improve the detection of human-made forgeries. In addition, we find that, in line with previous research, the inclusion of synthetic forgeries in the training also enables the detection of AI-generated forgeries, especially if created using a similar generator.

THE ROLE OF ACADEMIC SAMPLES IN VISUAL CULTURE AND THEIR HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Academic samples are a specific cultural phenomenon created by art academies since the beginnings of art education in the late 16th century. As a fundamental method of teaching and learning it was an integral part of art education untill the age of Modernism. Although the culture of academic samples has been strongly criticized for its uniformity and eclecticism, the entire concept of providing the samples of distinguished artworks as a reference source in studying the Fine Arts still seems valid. The practical application of the academic samples is twofold – (1) it ensures the permanence and consistency of the academic training and (2) focuses the student’s attention to the aesthetic experience of the object in question. Academic samples are both physical objects, usually copies of the original artworks, and immaterial conceptions on the overall appearance of objects. The latter aspect is possibly the most disputable one because it may indoctrinate the student’s imagination with non-specific images of a single aesthetical trend. Although every period of cultural history provides its own theoretical support to the concept of academic samples, the main potential value of use of sample objects, when they are consciously selected, is that it provides the resource for visual thinking and sharpens one’s attentiveness towards the observable object or space.

Multi-Source Style Transfer via Style Disentanglement Network

Despite the great success of deep neural networks for style transfer tasks, the entanglement of content and style in images leads to more style information not being captured. To tackle this problem, a novel style disentanglement network is proposed to transfer multi-source style elements. Specifically, we specialize in designing a learnable content style separation module, which can efficiently extract content and style components from images in the latent space. This method differs from the previous approaches by predefining content and style layers in the network. Under the condition of content and style separation, we continue to propose the multi-style swap module, which allows the content image to match more style elements. Additionally, by introducing alternate training strategies for the main and auxiliary decoders as well as style disentanglement loss, the stylized results look very similar to the original artworks. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with existing schemes.

Generative AI: Exploring the Applications of Generative Models in Creative Industries

Generative artificial intelligence, enabled through sophisticated machine learning frameworks, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), is disrupting the creative landscape within many of the creative industries, opening a new set of tools for content creation. Therefore, this article investigates the disruptions generative models present across multiple aspects of creative production, focusing on the influences of art, music, literature, and design. In the visual arts, generative AI produces original artworks that blend aesthetics and styles that extend conventional notions of creativity; in music, AI-composition tools allow musicians to compose original musical works and experiment with entirely new genres. In literature and storytelling, the same generative processes offer AI systems the ability to propose narrative frameworks and other textual elements that may instigate human writers to take these concepts further with a narrative or may stand on their own as original content. In design, generative algorithms support product development all the way down to quickly prototyping new products. The paper includes specific case studies or outlines of the application of generative AI tools to proposed projects, a discussion of effectiveness with the respective generative model, and the potential limitations generative models present for each creative area. The paper will also reflect on the threats generative AI may pose, the potential to redefine human creativity, originality, and ownership, implications for the potential decision-making capabilities of these systems, and if there may be consequences for society. In all these considerations, there are opportunities for and more significant implications of the potential of generative AI to assist and expand human creative possibilities throughout the entire creative process.

Aesthetics and Participation in Accessible Art Experiences

The action research project titled A Touch of Museum to Scale aims to improve the accessibility of the Museum to Scale art collection at the University of Antwerp. This project collaborates with various stakeholders to prototype tactile objects and an inclusive art guide for five artworks. It seeks to engage users of diverse abilities, investigate universal access services, and promote the integration of accessibility and artistic creation. The audio guide integrates visual descriptions and information for people with and without a visual impairment and integrates the artistic contributions of artists with and without disabilities. Artists also create tactile objects, which are an artistic and tactile translation of original artwork and a piece of art in their own right. The authors discuss project activities, such as personal observations, interviews, questionnaires, brainstorming sessions, and theoretical considerations based on literature and experience. The research is exploratory and invites both researchers and practitioners to reflect on participation and the aesthetics of access. Lay summary A Touch of Museum to Scale is a practice-based project that aims to improve the accessibility of the Museum to Scale art collection at the University of Antwerp. By working with various stakeholders, the team developed a prototype of tactile objects and an inclusive art guide for five artworks. This project is an experiment, in which we address several pertinent questions: how to create an audio guide that engages diverse abilities? How to make a guide that can be used by all? How to bring accessibility and artistic creation closer together? The result is an audio guide that combines visual descriptions and information for people with and without a visual impairment. It also includes the artistic contributions of artists with and without disabilities. In addition to the audio guide, artists have created tactile artworks to complement the original collection. In this text, the authors discuss the project activities and link them to insights from scientific literature. The authors hope to inspire a deeper reflection about accessibility and aesthetics in accessible art.

Darius Milhaud’s vocal cycle «Machines agricoles»: outrage or confession?

Relevance of the study. Darius Milhaud's vocal cycle Machines Agricoles (op. 56) was written in 1919. The significant date of creation of the cycle in the year of the end of the First World War forever tied it to a dramatic cultural and historical context, which did not remain aloof from Milhaud's artistic tasks, but was reflected by numerous semantic overtones in the concept of the work, the principles of organization and the original characteristics of the musical language. However, the vocal cycle Machines Agricoles appears in most musicological works as an example of the artist's joke, vocal curiosity, "Dadaist provocation" and the manifestation of youthful enthusiasm. It is a fairly established opinion that the cycle does not deserve any special attention, because it contains nothing but an outrageous declaration of everyday life. Therefore, turning to the cycle Machines Agricoles in the broad context of the intersection of many cultural layers of that time, identifying the semantic dimensions of their actualization in the original work of art and determining the main vectors of its understanding is an urgent question of modern musicology..
 The main objective of the study is to identify the specifics of the design and organization of the vocal cycle Machines Agricoles by Darius Milhaud as an expression of the artist's unique spiritual world.
 The scientific novelty is determined by the fact that the composition of the cycle is considered as a unique semantic continuum, which was conditioned by the emotional and intellectual flows of the spiritual life of Darius Milhaud. For the first time, the text of the work is examined in a broad contextual field, in which Machines Agricoles appear as a confessional phenomenon.
 The methodology of the article is based on historical, comparative, genre-stylistic and phenomenological methods of analysis.
 Results / findings and conclusions. Darius Milhaud's vocal cycle Machines Agricoles appears as a unique phenomenon of his spiritual life. Іn the cycle are reflected the mental and psychological characteristics of the artist's personality, which determined his unique role in the cultural context of France between the two world wars, as well as the difficult fate of his works written in the second half of the 20th century.
 Machines Agricoles are organically included in the context of French music and appear as the discovery of mental models and worldview guidelines that determine the specificity of national culture. Pastorale as a special spiritual dimension of human existence in the post-apocalyptic environment of post-war Europe; a sense of the subtle semantic layers of the artist's self-realization in the context of French musical traditions inextricably linked to the concept of mastery, clarity, "doneness"; the desire to create a complete sound world from equal layers of meaning, formed by expressive timbre means (the voice and each instrument has its own line) - all this testifies to the depth of the concept of the cycle and its unique role in the formation of Milhaud's creative credo.
 The paradoxical non-acceptance of these aspects of the composer's work in the majority of historical sources caused a misunderstanding of the originality of Milhaud's artistic position in the works of later years, prevented us from feeling the boundless sincerity, emotional vulnerability and trusting intonation of the author's address to the listener.
 Darius Milhaud's vocal cycle Machines Agricoles appears as an intimate confession of the author, which transforms a traumatic life experience into a new spiritual space, opens up opportunities to enter the world of perfect balance, and is evidence of the sound of a vulnerable soul that, despite everything, retains its human essence and ability to create.

Editor’s Note: You <em>Can</em> Go Home Again

I was thrilled to reconnect with old friend, and CCBC librarian, Merri Lindgren, at the library on the campus at UW-Madison.On a crisp Friday in late November, I was supposed to be visiting the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) in Madison, WI, to peruse the starred books of 2023. And I did—tables full of them.But two things distracted me; first was the amazing historic collection of books, which includes original books and artwork from Wisconsin native Ellen Raskin, author of the Newbery Award–winning The Westing Game. Her illustrations were bold, with in-your-face colors and funky typefaces—definitely a force ahead of her time.

24 February 2022 - for a Geocinematic Use of Found Images

Underlying the idea of precarity and the moving image, this paper describes the and theorizes about the original artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 as a video-installation interconnected with the concepts of precarity in production, circulation, and participation in media culture today, this art-based research artwork tries to underpin the very nature of found material as a gateway from the public to the private, commenting on the spectacle of mass media images and also the production of “anarchival” gestures through which its possible to research a specific historic event. Included in a research project entitled FrameScapes that the authors are undergoing at this time, this research outcome relates to the war that Russia brought again to the gates of Europe when it invaded the Ukrainian territory, and also to the conflict in real-time - live action we could call it - in a way we haven’t seen since Desert Storm back in 1991. A continuous feed of videos and photographs in an era of multi-screen distraction and tiktokian dystopias, artists and creatives have the upper hand in constructing from scratch, just like the cubists would glue together a piece of old newspaper and a matchbox to paint a still-life. The precarious nature of found material to make art is present since the first vanguard movements, from Picasso to Duchamp. Through the arts, we’ve been always confronted with gestures of appropriation, quotation, found-footage, archival art, collage or the ready-made, all of these related to meager images. From Marcel Duchamp to Kurt Schwitters, from Douglas Gordon to Christian Marclay, artists have always looked into the metaphor of the precarious as a recontextualization and remediation of image and sound. The artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 is an exploratory artwork about the world-as-camera-screen, responding critically and creatively to different structures of the social, economic and political contexts in today’s art research practice that deals with found materials. The phenomenon of a tele-visual structure presupposes different atopic tele-communities, built under the aegis of tele-presence and tele-objectivity – a dissolution of real space, that embraces geocinematics as a strong narrative contemporary structure, constructed with and bound by precarious images – images that are consistent with a tangible structure of the Real.

From Protons to Picasso: Recreating Famous Paintings Using Proton Beams as a “Paintbrush”

To many, medicine is just as much an artform as it is a science. From the colorful stains used in diagnostic pathology, to the tactile sculpting of surgery, to the dose painting in radiation oncology, there is beauty and art to be found across all disciplines. In pencil-beam-scanning proton therapy, the dose is painted layer-by-layer, spot-by-spot, allowing for significantly more control compared to conventional radiation. This work intends to showcase the immense capability of intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) through the recreation of some of the most renowned artworks throughout history, and has potential applications in patient education, medical/physics education, and quality assurance. Five (5) well-recognized paintings spanning from the Golden Age to the modern era were recreated as treatment plans in the Eclipse (version 16.1) External Beam Planning environment. For each "painting" (treatment plan), clinical protons within the range of 70-250 MeV were used to deposit "paint" (radiation dose) onto a "canvas" (water phantom) to a prescription of 100 Gy. The individual elements of each artwork were first delineated as separate structures. Colors were then assigned to appropriate isodose lines to mimic the corresponding palettes found in the original artworks. For each treatment plan, a single field was used along with inverse optimization to deposit the different doses at a depth of 10 centimeters. The resulting dose distribution was calculated with the proton convolution-superposition algorithm used in clinical practice. The dose distributions of the "paintings" demonstrated a marked semblance to the original artworks with sufficient resolution to elucidate fine details. The "paintings" varied in dimension from 20-30 cm at isocenter and on average took between 5-6 hours to complete. The number of structures used for planning ranged from 6-65 depending on the style and complexity of the original artwork. For a fractional dose of 200 cGy, the number of monitor units ranged from 73,145-269,970. With the advent of IMPT and modern planning techniques, we can now realize increasingly complex treatment plans, allowing for the creation of dose distributions that are highly targeted and specific. This is demonstrated by the capability to create recognizable works of art using proton beams as a "paintbrush".