Artistic Production Research Articles

Exploring the Role of Leadership in Art History

Leadership is an integral yet understudied component of art history. This paper explores the role of influential leaders who shaped the course of art movements and genres throughout history. A visual and documentary analysis is conducted to examine how leadership manifests in artistic works and historical texts. The study analyses key art historical figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, and others who pioneered new techniques, spearheaded movements, founded institutions, mentored proteges, or galvanized public interest in the arts. Their lasting impacts as champions of artistic innovations and progress are evaluated. Archival letters, journals, articles, and other documents provide insights into leadership styles, relationships with followers, and strategic decision-making. Patterns of patronage linking leaders with wealthy, powerful, or religious institutions are also explored. The visual record reveals how leadership was conveyed symbolically through the content and style of seminal works. The analysis integrates qualitative evidence from both visual and documentary sources to build a historical understanding of leadership's central, multifaceted role in shaping the direction of art. This study aims to highlight leadership as a driving force in art history and understand how leaders profoundly influenced the production, dissemination, and reception of art across successive eras.

Advancing Insights into Probiotics during Vegetable Fermentation.

Fermented vegetables have a long history and are enjoyed worldwide for their unique flavors and health benefits. The process of fermentation improves the nutritional value, taste, and shelf life of foods. Microorganisms play a crucial role in this process through the production of metabolites. The flavors of fermented vegetables are closely related to the evaluation and succession of microbiota. Lactic acid bacteria (LABs) are typically the dominant bacteria in fermented vegetables, and they help inhibit the growth of spoilage bacteria and maintain a healthy gut microbiota in humans. However, homemade and small-scale artisanal products rely on spontaneous fermentation using bacteria naturally present on fresh vegetables or from aged brine, which may introduce external microorganisms and lead to spoilage and substandard products. Hence, understanding the role of LABs and other probiotics in maintaining the quality and safety of fermented vegetables is essential. Additionally, selecting probiotic fermentation microbiota and isolating beneficial probiotics from fermented vegetables can facilitate the use of safe and healthy starter cultures for large-scale industrial production. This review provides insights into the traditional fermentation process of making fermented vegetables, explains the mechanisms involved, and discusses the use of modern microbiome technologies to regulate fermentation microorganisms and create probiotic fermentation microbiota for the production of highly effective, wholesome, safe, and healthy fermented vegetable foods.

Unravelling the skills and motivations of Magdalenian artists in the depths of Atxurra Cave (Northern Spain)

Atxurra cave has a decorated assemblage composed of more than a hundred engraved animal depictions. All of them are located in deep parts of the cave and most of them are hidden in raised areas, away from the main path. The main sector is the “Ledge of the Horses”, located at 330 m from the entrance of the cave. It is a space of 12 m long and 1.5 m wide, elevated 4 m above the cave floor. This area includes almost fifty engraved and painted animals accompanied by a dozen flint tools, three fireplaces, and around one hundred charcoal fragments from torches. This extraordinary archaeological record allows us to value the complexity of the artistic production inside the caves during the Upper Palaeolithic. Our study has confirmed that there is planning prior to artistic production, both in terms of the iconographic aspects (themes, techniques, formats), its location (visibility, capacity), and the lighting systems. Furthermore, the data indicates the panel was decorated to be seen by third parties from different positions and was expressly illuminated for this purpose. This evidence supports the role of rock art as a visual communication system in Upper Palaeolithic societies.

Manifesting Rights on Cloth: Regalia and Relations on the Northwest Coast

Using buttons and beads sewn on wool and calico, Northwest Coast First Nations women fashion the robes and aprons essential to ongoing expressions of inherited prerogatives and rights. Each piece of regalia is carefully crafted to include signifying materials and motifs, telling of the origins or relations of their owners. These creations exist as part of a holistic system that integrates material artworks within ceremony, including song, dance, and oratory, which in turn uphold the laws expressed through potlatching. Shifting scholarly focus from Northwest Coast carving traditions, this paper recenters textile arts within a holistic, culturally focused context while addressing issues of gender, the effects of colonial practices, and the damage wrought by salvage anthropology as it fragmented cultural information across archives. Women’s artistic productions embody long-held technical and aesthetic knowledge connected to oral histories and cultural practices. Restoring Indigenous perspectives connecting tangible and intangible cultural heritage counterbalances the aesthetic emphasis that has dominated Northwest Coast art history.

Virtual reconstruction of the Palaeolithic landscape in Santimamiñe cave (Bizkaia, Spain)

Santimamiñe Cave, in Biscay (North Spain) is a well-known archaeological site in the region because of its prompt discovery and excavation in the early 20th century and its ensemble of parietal art. The latest studies have identified human occupation in the entrance from the Lower Magdalenian, while the inner passages were presumably decorated in the Middle and Upper phases of the period (about 16.5 to 14.5 ka). One of the particularities of the cave is its lithochemical deposits in the form of numerous speleothems which acted as a tourist attraction. These formations coat the original passage of the cave, which formed in Lower Cretaceous limestone in the Basque-Cantabrian basin. They have created obstacles (squeezes, climbs, ramps, irregular floors, etc.) which hamper movement through the cave. In fact, Santimamiñe is known for the location of its Palaeolithic art in places with very difficult access. This complicated structure of the cave meant that work had to be carried out during the 20th century so that Santimamiñe could be used as a show cave. Unfortunately, the alterations mean that it is now difficult to imagine what the cave was like in the Magdalenian, when it was decorated.The present study has proposed and developed a methodology for the virtual reconstruction of the cave, based on a geomorphologic study of the karst, the analysis of historical records and three-dimensional digitalisation of the cave. It has thus been possible to reconstruct virtually the form of the cave when it was decorated. This is a key step for a more detailed understanding of human behaviour related to artistic production in the Middle and Upper Magdalenian.

Rooting the Palestinian Shatat in Jordan: Art, Objects, and the Matter of Belonging

This article presents the concept of dispersed rooting in order to understand the significance of Palestinian visual and material productions in Jordan. The authors argue that the production of art and traditional clothing, as well as the consumption of souvenirs, constitutes rooting practices that connect exiled Palestinians to the broader Palestinian people and homeland within the shifting and negotiated limits of protracted displacement in Jordan. By considering the role of art and objects in the rooting of Palestinians, this article elucidates the importance of visual and material culture for the meaning of identity and belonging among a dispersed population of exiled Palestinian refugees. Specifically, it demonstrates how producing Palestinian art and tradition is deeply implicated in the reproduction of the Palestinian self and community. As the analysis indicates, Palestinians produce visual and material culture to root themselves in a world where Palestine persists, and where their belonging to it and its people remains inviolable.

ONE SHOT FACE STYLIZATION USING GANS

One-shot face stylization is an interesting and challenging subject in computer vision and deep learning. This work deals with the art of manipulating a target face using a reference image as inspiration, which requires controlling facial recognition while specifying important style characteristics This project has attracted a lot of interest due to its potential applications in digital art, entertainment, and personal products. In this abstract, we examine the important features of a one- shot face stylization. Deep neural networks, especially generative adversarial networks (GANs), are widely used in the process to generate customized facial images. These networks are trained on data structures that combine the target and reference faces, with the reference image acting as a strategic identifier. The success of a one-shot facial lies in the meticulous execution of the fading process, which strikes a balance between preserving identity and improving technique. These disadvantages typically include a combination of manpower retention, strategic formation, emotional quality, and enemy training. In conclusion, advances in this field have the potential to transform creative expression and personalization across industries from digital art and animation to virtual avatars and social media filters. Key Words: Facial recognition, generative adversarial networks, virtual avatar, image to image transfer.

Installing Democracy

Transitional justice is a framework for dealing with past atrocities that are on such a large scale and so horrific that the usual institutions and justice system are unable to adequately address them. Countries in Latin America that transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s pursued transitional justice when deciding how to meet the demands of victims and what to do with perpetrators. The interdisciplinary field of transitional justice studies is robust within the social sciences and law. Yet artistic production engages in dialogues with the official and unofficial stories of the dictatorships and their legacies and also contributes to understanding transitions to democracy. This essay examines how visual art in Uruguay engages with transitional justice and memory of the dictatorship (1973–85), taking as a case study the installation Artista de mierda (Artist of Shit, 2019) by Fernando Barrios (b. 1968). Nearly four decades after Uruguay began its democratic transition, the struggle over which narratives would dominate the collective memory of state terror and what society should do about the open wounds of the dictatorship continues to be negotiated. Beyond merely reflecting common discourses about the dictatorship and democracy, Artista de mierda engages with the memory of state violence and reveals how Uruguay’s incomplete transition to democracy and its embrace of neoliberalism exacerbate inequality and create conditions for certain political figures and artists to rise to prominence within their respective fields.

The politics of attention in the paintings of René Tavares

René Tavares’s artistic production actively engages with political themes like migration and racism, simultaneously reflecting and inviting the deconstruction of the ‘alert attentional regime’. This term refers to our digital era's characteristic heightened state of alertness and fragmented attention, which scatters our focus across multiple streams of information. Rather than simply mirroring society’s fragmented attentional state, his work fosters more mindful and intentional engagement, encouraging viewers to transcend the transient attentiveness inherent in contemporary society. Central to his practice is the concept of rhythm, symbolizing the velocity of modern life and facilitating a shift to more sustained attention. This is achieved through patterns and colours that mimic swift information cycles, inherent to our times, captivating the viewer’s attention while setting the stage for a deeper, more mindful engagement with the artwork. Tavares intertwines elements like the ‘floating mark’, representing ephemeral meanings in our digital era; ‘polyfocality’, reflecting and addressing society’s fragmented attention through multiple focal points, and ‘pictorial syncretism’, which refers to the amalgamation of different painterly registers such as stains, graphic registers, splatters, layer overlay, word insertion and scrapings, blending visual traditions to highlight the fluid cultural boundaries in our globalized world. By doing so, it potentially opens up the possibility for a redistribution of the sensible, prompting critical thinking and an inherently political understanding of our place within a broader societal context.

What can we draw from digitality?

The findings of this paper relate to a recent body of drawings in my practice that owe its genealogy to the reproductive technologies of printmaking and photography. I relate these findings to my understanding of the ‘index’, borrowing from semiotics, as distinct from the symbol in which it establishes its meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to its referent, therefore bearing marks or traces, whose causal effects signify the object it refers to. This is further extended by both the explosion of digitality that came on the heels of the financial crisis of 2008 and forms of automatism that follow a set of investigative procedures to organize and govern practice but do not determine outcomes. Digitality, here, is either utilized as a visible element of artistic production or utilized as a symptom of the present, materialized as a trace. It flattens the physical axis of the trace into an immediate presence that collapses virtuality and materiality together on a known artefact such as paper.

The Effect of an Instructional Program, Based on Creative Thinking, on Developing Painting Composition skills among students

This research, entitled “The Effect of an Instructional Program Based on Creative Thinking to Develop Students’ Skills in Composition of Painting”, is a study that, through designing a program, works on the basis of creative thinking to develop students’ artistic products and solve the problems of composition subject in a scientific way under the light of new and creative thinking. This study aims at revealing the effect of the instructional program on developing students’ composition skills. It also attempts to find out the differences between genders (male and female) in terms of the effect of the instructional program on students’ skills in composing paintings and utilizing creative thinking in their paintings. Likewise, this program was applied on fourth year students of plastic art department, painting branch at Chamchamal Fine Arts Institute. Experimental method has been used with one group that their number was 18 students. Psychosometric charectristics of the used instruments were obtained and then a pre-test was carried out with the students. In addition, the students were taught for 6 weeks through the new creative thinking program which was based on experts’ views and scientific sources. At the end of the course, a post-test took place that included theoretical and practical parts. The practical part and products were scored and assessed by a committee of specialists in the field. Moreover, the data was analysed based on the Mann Whitney U test, Wilcoxon Test equations. The results of the study showed that there was a positive effect of the instructional program on the developing painting composition skills. Regarding the gender difference, the study revealed that despite the existence of differences between male and female students in the pre-test, there was a signifant differences between gender in Painting Compositionin in the post-test. Suggesting that, the instructional program is benefical for both male and female students. Conversely, statistically signifant difference between gender was not found in creative thinking in the post-test.

실감형 미디어아트에 나타난 초현실주의 표현기법에 관한 연구

This study analyzes and proposes the possibility of combining realistic media art and surrealistic expressive techniques. To do so, we first understand the types and characteristics of surrealistic expressive techniques. In particular, we focus on Alexandrian and Suzy Gablik's work on depaysment. Second, by collecting and analyzing examples of d’strict's works, we summarize the characteristics of depaysment network representation in realistic media art. Third, we propose how surrealistic expression techniques can be used to improve the artistry of realistic media art and design education. This study is limited to six works in the d’strict, and is conducted through the methods of literature review and case analysis. The results of the study showed that the characteristics of the depaysment network such as 'opening up the unknown dimension' and 'bringing life' were mainly utilized in the six realistic media artworks of the d’strict. In addition, various depaysment elements emphasize the core meaning of the artwork through visual impact, which confirms that depaysment features enhance the effectiveness of realistic media art. Finally, this study proposes a theoretical basis for how the characteristics of depaysment, one of the surrealistic expression techniques, can contribute to the development of media art production and design education in the future.

ESSENCE, LAWS AND MEANS OF COMPOSITION ACTIVITY IN THE PROCESS OF DESIGNING AND MANUFACTURING PRODUCTS OF DECORATIVE AND APPLIED ART

The article substantiates the relevance of introducing information about the artistic direction into the training of future technological education specialists; attention is paid to the importance of art education during training of future teachers. It has been established that the future teacher of technological education must possess professional competencies that increase the efficiency of designing and manufacturing decorative and applied art products, which include competencies in the basics of compositional activity. In order to form these competencies, the educational process of training future technology teachers should include information that can enrich students with theoretical and practical knowledge and skills in fine and decorative and applied arts in the content of both basic and elective disciplines. Emphasis is placed on the expediency of studying the main concepts, laws and means of compositional activity in the process of training specialists in the field of technological education, the content of the main concepts, laws and means of composition is revealed and the importance of their application in the process of designing and manufacturing products of decorative and applied art is proven; the advantages of students’ use of professional competences in the design process are revealed and their effectiveness in the implementation of creative tasks is shown. It has been established that having mastered the basics of compositional activity during the design and manufacture of decorative and applied art products, students will be able to practically solve rather complex tasks of creating aesthetic compositions that will correspond to the selected material and the functional purpose of the object decorated in the process of artistic and labor activity.
 Keywords: professional competences; composition activity; technology teachers; decorative and applied art; design of products.

"I base my life on sadness": Apparently paradoxical sources of resilience among young Haitians.

Haitian expressions of resilience also hold deep knowledge of human vulnerability. This longitudinal, qualitative study with young Haitians from urban shantytowns combines ethnographic and participatory methods to explore the complexities behind such idioms. Artistic and creative products made by or with the youth facilitated interviews, focus group discussions, and workshops. Through the life stories of participants and rich ethnographic material, this study presents locally situated idioms of resilience (and distress). By including local social ecology, the idioms were framed as historically and culturally rooted, thus shaping contextual, pragmatic, and gendered coping strategies grounded in embodied experiences of vulnerability and resistance. The study adds essential insights into Haitian resilience, revealing the local logics behind seemingly paradoxical statements. By drafting a conceptual framework for further studies on idioms of resilience, the study also makes a theoretical contribution to international resilience research.

The Community Museum of Sierra Hermosa (Zacatecas): Rethinking the Museology, Landscapes, and Archives from the Desert

This article presents the methodology and collective work strategies that constitute the Club de Lectura y Museo Comunitario de Sierra Hermosa (Sierra Hermosa Community Museum and Reading Club) in Zacatecas, Mexico, a space founded by visual artist Juan Manuel de la Rosa, a native of this place. The museum emerged as a small library in 2000; and a short time after its founding, the museological program incorporated textile workshops and an exhibition gallery for a collection organized with local and external donations. It also operates with a system of rotation within the town. This article reviews the historical, theoretical, and critical implications around the conception and action of the museum, with a focus on the colonial and the migration status that sustains the reality and history of this rural locality, situated on the Tropic of Cancer in the north of Mexico. In the context of extreme violence, extractive politics, and migratory crisis in Zacatecas, this article analyzes two artistic productions by the local painter Luis Lara and artist Cristóbal Gracia, developed in the context of this experimental and rural museum curatorial program. Moreover, this article redefines concepts such as the border, mobility, and cultural contact in an artistic, museological, and pedagogical context, and proposes alternatives to study Sierra Hermosa’s memory, history, and landscape.

COLOR DESIGN OF JEWELRY AND ART PRODUCTS: PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

The article is devoted to different ways of creating multi-colored jewelry and artistic articles, and the peculiarities of their design. It deals with the ways of creating multi-coloured compositional decisions of adornments, problems and difficulties, arising in the process of designing, manufacturing, exploitation and repairing of articles. It is shown that the attractiveness and durability of color design of jewelry and art items largely depends on the combination of various jewelry elements, lighting, surface treatment, used pre- cious and non-precious materials, technologies of their processing and decoration, color perception by dif- ferent groups of consumers and the changing fashion.

THE USE OF COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN SYSTEMS IN THE WORK OF AN ARTIST-DESIGNER OF JEWELRY

The article deals with the issue of a set of technical requirements for the design project of a jewelry. Unlike graphic design, which does not require the implementation of the project in the material, jewelry design can be considered realized only if the product is manufactured or can be successfully implemented without loss of artistic and figurative characteristics. An emotionally colored creative process is inextricably linked with an engineering and intellectual approach to problem solving, including the preparation of design documentation. The use of a three-dimensional design system in the creation of jewelry and art products not only accelerates the process of design implementation of the idea, but also helps to transfer these ideas into industrial production as accurately and technically as possible.

Investigation of the effects of red clay on the structural properties of chamotted clay bodies

Chamotte means fired clay. It is also called Grog and it can have many particle sizes, from fine to coarse. The composition formed by the addition of chamotte to various clay compositions is called chamotte mud (CM). The most preferred and widely used muds in the production of artistic ceramic products are chamotte mud and red pottery mud (R-PM). The sintering, linear shrinkage, water absorption, and color properties of these muds vary depending on their components and firing temperatures. Chamotte mud has properties that make it suitable for use at high temperatures (1150-1200 oC). The obtained products, however, have a high-water absorption value, because it deforms in high-temperature firings, the red Kınık pottery mud used in the study is typically used for artistic productions at low temperatures such as 900-1000 oC. Ceramic artists may prefer to combine and use both types of mud to enhance the color effects and shaping properties in their works. 
 The aim of this study is to reduce water absorption of the body while increasing firing shrinkage, in other words, increasing shrinkage during sintering by adding red pottery mud to chamotte mud and also to optimize the tendency of the R-PM to undergo deformation with temperature. As a result, the products obtained, particularly those produced for artistic outdoor use, will have a longer lifetime. In experimental studies, 6 recipes were produced by combining chamotte and red mud in specific ratios, and the changes in properties such as water absorption, linear shrinkage, color, gloss, microstructure, and sintering behavior of ceramic bodies as a result of firing at 1160 oC were investigated.

Before the Holocene humid period: Life-sized camel engravings and early occupations on the southern edge of the Nefud desert

The Neolithic of northern Arabia is characterised by monumental stone structures, ephemeral ‘hearth sites’ indicative of a highly mobile lifestyle, and a rich rock art heritage with iconic representations of domesticated livestock. However, the character and timing of occupation prior to the spread of pastoralism (ca. 6000 BCE) remains elusive, with only one stratified Epipalaeolithic site and two surface early Neolithic sites so-far known in the Jubbah Oasis. Here we present Sahout, a newly documented rock art site with Neolithic and earlier occupations, on the southern edge of the Nefud desert. The rock art is dominated by life-sized, naturalistic, engravings of camels, which are in some cases superimposed with Neolithic imagery of domesticated sheep. Surveys and test excavations carried out in the vicinity of the rock art revealed a lithic assemblage with similarities to the late Epipalaeolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Levant. Radiocarbon ages from two test trenches and two hearths indicate repeated occupation at Sahout between the Terminal Pleistocene and the Middle Holocene, which partly mirror the rock art sequence. Investigations at Sahout indicate that rock art production in northern Arabia may have begun earlier than previously thought. Research also suggests a broader geographical extent to human occupations prior to the Holocene humid period.

The Ittar Industry of Kannauj: A Saga of Commodification of Olfactory Aesthetics

Kannauj is an historic city in northern India, which is known since antiquity for producing high quality natural ittar (natural perfume). This study explores the notion that perfume is a product of science and standardised production and marketing practices, whereas ittar is a natural product derived from traditional knowledge and craft production processes passed on through generations. The study highlights the ‘deg-bhapka’ technique of ittar production, explores the lifeworlds of the artisans, their perception of the art, discusses the main ittar varieties, and explores the role of social and cultural capital in preserving the legacy over generations. Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were used for data collection. Finally, the study examines the contemporary challenges and bottlenecks in this heritage industry and the incongruency of the art of ittar-making to the nuances of the capitalist economy. The possibilities for evolving and marketing ittar as a ‘green’, ‘organic’ and ‘indigenous’ product of traditional art and contemporary aesthetic standards are explored.