Representation In Painting Research Articles

Artistic creativity and DBS: A case report

Background Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a treatment for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) who are not adequately controlled with medications. An artist reported changes in her artistic creativity and art appreciation when treated with left DBS. We sought to study her artistic productions and her appreciation of art while both “on” and “off” left DBS. Methods A 69-year-old right-handed woman with an approximate 20-year history of PD was referred to us for management of a left subthalamic region nucleus (STN) DBS placed at another institution 4years prior. In Experiment 1 we had her rate several dimensions (Evocative Impact, Aesthetics, Novelty, Technique, Closure and Representation) of another artist's paintings. In Experiment 2, we tested her with the Abbreviated Torrance Test (of creativity) for Adults (ATTA). During testing the patient remained on her dopaminergic medication, but was tested on and off left DBS. Results On the judgment task while “on” left DBS, versus “off” DBS, there were significant reductions in her appreciation of artistic Closure and Technique. When “off” DBS her ATTA creativity index was above average, but when switched “on” her creativity index was below average. Conclusions These results suggest the possibility that left ventral STN/SNR DBS reduces creativity as well as appreciation of art. The reason for these alterations is not known, but might be related to enhanced activation of the left hemisphere and reciprocal deactivation of the right hemisphere which mediates both visuospatial skills and global attention, both of which are important in artistic creativity and appreciation.

Iconic wonder: Pavel Florensky’s phenomenology of the face

The key focus of this essay is the experience of encountering divine wonder in things. The examination of the divine encounter is staged against the phenomenological backdrop. Specifically, the concept of the divine wonder is taken in its original, Husserlian, definition as Verwunderung and is traced via Levinas and his concept of face (le visage) to the early 20th century Russian philosopher, Pavel Florensky (1882–1943), whose 1922 essay “Iconostasis” approaches divine representation (лuк) in icon painting explicitly and consistently as a phenomenon of wonder. More broadly, by connecting Florensky and his work to the phenomenological project at large, this essay aspires to show that the early 20th century Russian contributions to phenomenological thought go beyond adaptations and simulations of the traditional phenomenological prolegomena toward highly original philosophical encounters.

The Russian Avant‐Garde Painting Palette Documentary and Physicochemical Study of Inorganic Colorants

In the present article an attempt is being made to elucidate the inorganic colorants encountered in the Russian avant-garde painting palette by a combined art historical, documentary and physicochemical investigation; and to examine the influence of environmental factors on the chromatic profile originally sought by the artist. The overall approach based on written sources is confirmed by measurements on representative paintings from the Costakis Collection in the State Museum for Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. The documentary research deals with the influences of Orthodox iconography, folkloric art, and occidental modernist tendencies on the Russian avant-garde palette; and is studying the effects of contradictory historical processes in the chromatic profile of individual paintings. In the experimental section a series of colorants are investigated concerning the effects of accelerated ageing on experimental painting tables, prepared as watercolour and gouache layers on paper ground. The resulting samples are subject to colorimetric, and spectroscopic measurements; and analogous analytical procedures are applied on samples taken from selected paintings belonging to the Costakis Collection. A systematic comparative study of all data permits evaluating the materials used as to their stability towards exstrincic factors, and proposing degradation routes, in order to assist museum curators and conservators in every concrete case related to the broad spectrum of pigments examined.

Hitler's Face: The Biography of an Image (review)

Reviewed by: Hitler's Face: The Biography of an Image Richard T. Gray (bio) Claudia Schmölders . Hitler's Face: The Biography of an Image. Trans. Adrian Daub. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. 226 pp. ISBN 0-812-23902-4, $36.50. There is likely no face as widely disseminated, as universally recognized throughout the entire world, and as bitterly scorned as that of Adolf Hitler. How can we explain the uncanny fascination of this countenance, at once distinctly individual and yet peculiarly amorphous? Surely in the postwar decades the allure of Hitler's visage is related to the wish to give a face to evil incarnate; for Hitler has become indistinguishable from the egregious crimes against humanity committed on his orders and in his name. And yet, as Claudia Schmölders convincingly demonstrates, an uncanny seductiveness and almost perverse appeal emanated from Hitler's face long before he came to symbolize the atrocities of the Holocaust. Is this reflex connected with that tension between the mundane and the horrid that Hannah Arendt so felicitously—and frighteningly—termed the "banality of evil"? Was Hitler's face, as some contemporary witnesses claimed, simply a featureless void that invited its viewers to fill it in with random meanings? Or did Hitler's countenance, demeanor, and—perhaps most importantly—voice actually exude that haunting charisma so often attributed to him? Or must, ultimately, the seduction and enthralling fascination of Hitler's image and person be attributed to one of the most successful advertising and media campaigns the world has ever known? These are some of the questions Claudia Schmölders attempts to address in her provocative and illuminating study Hitler's Face. As Schmölders's subtitle indicates, this work is conceived as the "biography of an image." In this regard it departs from the methodology of traditional biography by concentrating not on the facts and the evidence revealing its subject's life experiences and personal development, but by focusing instead on the images that document—and oftentimes construct—particular phases of that life. In other words, what Schmölders presents is not just [End Page 753] another history of the person Adolf Hitler, but rather a history of his imagistic representation in painting, photograph, and print-media reproduction. In this sense the more common relationship between biographical data and pictorial illustration has been reversed: here it is not the pictures that illustrate the life, but rather the life that, as it were, illustrates the pictures. It is in keeping with this aim that Schmölders assembles and analyzes over fifty depictions of Hitler, ranging in type from the family album snapshot, to propaganda photos in the service of a constructed image, to hagiographic portraits of the political leader, through finally to caricatures of the demagogue. Schmölders's argument is that the history of Hitler's imagistic representation tells a story that supplements in important ways the tales told by more traditional biographers about Hitler's life. The subtitle of Schmölders's original German text, which was published in 2000, "eine physiognomische Biographie" (a physiognomic biography), says more about the specificity of her project than does the less descriptive English subtitle. For what is unique about Schmölders's take on Hitler iconography is the fact that she embeds it in a wider discursive context that, while not peculiar to Germany alone, experienced an unusual blossoming in German speaking Europe during the years between the First and the Second World Wars. This context is the obsession with physiognomy, the interpretation of human character, faculties, and potential based on readings of external facial features. Reaching back to the immensely popular and widely disseminated writings on physiognomy of the Swiss Pastor Johann Caspar Lavater, published in the final decades of the eighteenth century, this intellectual-historical movement came to a head in the years of the Weimar Republic in Germany, which saw the publication of innumerable works that sought to marry empirical science with physiognomic interpretation. Schmölders is absolutely correct to emphasize the significance of this cultural backdrop as a determining factor for the mystique surrounding images of Hitler's face. Her thesis is that a series of intellectual and cultural...

Hegemony and Ambiguity: Discourses, Counter-discourses and Hidden Meanings in French Depictions of the Conquest and Settlement of Algeria

This article examines the discourses to be read in painted representations of colonial motifs (and their modes of display) in France between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, i.e. until the dawn—but not the completion—of decolonisation. It will analyse selected images, some of which have become emblematic as triumphant and/or enduring manifestations of colonial domination. It will question the readings and uses of such images from the time of conquest to the post-colonial era. This article's focus, however, will be less on the well-rehearsed dominant discourses than on gaps, silences, unanswered questions, misgivings and various non-dits which can be detected, on closer examination, in these works, their modes of diffusion and their reception by contemporaries. It will look for signs of ambivalence in the rendition of colonial scenes by the artists themselves (such as Vernet or Fromentin), who visited the sites of battle scenes in Algeria shortly after gruesome events had taken place. In particular, the paper will look for haunting visions of what had happened there, beyond the official, hegemonic discourse which was fashionable at the time, and which, in some cases, these artists had been commissioned to illustrate. The main argument concentrates closely on discourse and counter-discourse analysis, as well as the fluidity and the transferability of discourses across the colonial/post-colonial divide.

The Trouble with Painting, the Image (less) Text

This article argues that painting and its theory founds and subtends the discipline and practices of the history of art. It proposes this epistemological situation as a problem for visual culture. The article begins by locating the centrality of painting as intellection in the person and work of Leonardo da Vinci and in the writing on him by Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin. An investigation of the inheritance of Leonardo da Vinci in the 17th century follows, in order to historicize his exemplarity both in early 20th-century art theory and in the dissipating aura associated with painting. The emergence of the ‘art book’ in the 17th century in Italy and France, particularly the first edition of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, is seen as significant in the transformation of the image and its power to represent through the materiality and characteristics of the book. This transformation, the basis of ‘the trouble with painting’, occurred amongst an elite group of connoisseurs, prelates, and aristocrats. Using images and subject matter drawn from early ‘art books’, the article revises the theories of representation in painting found in Michel Foucault and Louis Marin, among others, in order to understand more clearly what has been at stake in the espousal of the visual and the verbal in the genealogy of the literature on art.

A new SVM based emotional classification of image

How high-level emotional representation of art paintings can be inferred from perceptual level features suited for the particular classes (dynamic vs. static classification) is presented. The key points are feature selection and classification. According to the strong relationship between notable lines of image and human sensations, a novel feature vector WLDLV (Weighted Line Direction-Length Vector) is proposed, which includes both orientation and length information of lines in an image. Classification is performed by SVM (Support Vector Machine) and images can be classified into dynamic and static. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the algorithm.

Painting canvas synthesis

We present the development of a procedural method for texturing and modeling different kinds of woven canvas used to support easel paintings. The detailed macro- and microgeometry of textiles and different weaving patterns found in woven fabrics is conveniently simulated by procedural displacement and surface shading. The common varieties of canvas used in art production since the Italian Renaissance period are presented and recreated. The anatomy of an oil-based painting is briefly introduced and a visual simulation of decay presented. We also apply our texturing and shading techniques to a simple geometric representation of painting to help visualize the changing characteristics developed during the aging process of a canvas support kept in uncontrolled environmental conditions.

Representation in Painting and Consciousness

Representation in Painting and Consciousness

Representation of the 3D world in art and in the brain

In this article we address the major issue of space vision, how the brain represents the 3D visual world, on the basis of psychophysics, art and neurophysiology. In psychophysics, Gibson found texture gradient and width gradient as well as the gradient of binocular disparity as the major cues of surface orientation in depth. Marr proposed that surface-based representation is the main step to 3D shape representation. In art, the most important method to represent the 3D scene was the linear perspective introduced in Renaissance art and was the most successful in the domestic art of Vermeer. However, Cézanne modified the linear perspective and used surface-based representation in landscape painting. In our neurophysiological study of the monkey parietal cortex, we found surface-orientation-selective (SOS) neurons in the caudal intraparietal (CIP) area. SOS neurons responded selectively to surface orientation in depth presented in random dot stereogram (RDS) with disparity gradient. Many of the SOS neurons also responded selectively to texture gradient and linear perspective, and their responses were enhanced by the combination of these cues. It was concluded that the surface-based representation of the 3D scene might be constructed in the brain by the integration of monocular and binocular cues of depth.

A phenomenological study of the body and its representations in painting

This research originates in my practice as a painter and teacher of life drawing; and seeks to question whether the figurative nude in painting is unfinished business. Being a practising artist and not an academic, has influenced both my methodology and the relationship between practice and theory. Reading, visual practice, writing, and the analysis of other artists' work, all stimulate and inform each other; with the result that practice and theory have equal weight, neither being an illustration of the other. These dual concerns are not unified in one investigation but have developed as interdependent parallel strands. The practical element is a search to find strategies for painting the figurative nude, which can stimulate a sense of a corporeal body for the viewer. This theoretical investigation is an examination of the nature and structure of realism, its hermeneutical association with the viewer and its position in relation to the Kantian sublime.

Projection distortion analysis for flattened image mosaicing from straight uniform generalized cylinders

This paper presents a new approach for reconstructing images mapped or painted on straight uniform generalized cylinders (SUGC). A set of monocular images is taken from different viewpoints in order to be mosaiced and to represent the entire scene in detail. The expressions of the SUGC's projection axis are derived from two cross-sections projected onto the image plane. Based on these axes we derive the SUGC localization in the camera coordinate system. We explain how we can find a virtual image representation when the intersection of the two axes is matched to the image center. We analyze the perspective distortions when flattening a scene which is mapped on a SUGC. We evaluate the lower and the upper bounds of the necessary number of views in order to represent the entire scene from a SUGC, by considering the distortions produced by perspective projection. A region matching based mosaicing method is proposed to be applied on the flattened images in order to obtain the complete scene. The mosaiced scene is visualized on a new synthetic surface by a mapping procedure. The proposed algorithm is used for the representation of mural paintings located on SUGCs with closed cross-sections (circles for columns), or opened cross-sections (ellipses or parabolas for vaults).

On the use of computational fluid dynamics in the prediction and control of exposure to airborne contaminants—an illustration using spray painting

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is employed to simulate breathing-zone concentration for a simple representation of spray painting a flat plate in a cross-flow ventilated booth. The results demonstrate the capability of CFD to track correctly changes in breathing-zone concentration associated with work practices shown previously to be significant in determining exposure. Empirical data, and models verified through field studies, are used to examine the predictive capability of these simulations and to identify important issues in the conduct of such comparisons. A commercially available CFD package is used to solve a three-dimensional turbulent flow problem for the velocity field, and to subsequently generate particle trajectories for polydisperse aerosols. An in-house algorithm is developed to convert the trajectory data to breathing-zone concentrations, transfer efficiencies and aerosol size distributions. The mesh size, time step, duration of the simulation, and number of particles per size interval are all important variables in achieving convergent results.

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. By Wu Hung. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 296 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. By Wu Hung. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 296 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Hemingway's Debt to Cezanne: New Perspectives

As they stood admiring the foreboding Rocks at Fontainebleau in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in November 1949, Hemingway confided to Lillian Ross that it was from Paul Cezanne that he had learned how to construct his own verbal landscapes (Baker 479). While elements of his style had been shaped by The Kansas City Star's style manual, by Ezra Pound, and by Gertrude Stein,(1) Cezanne has emerged as a subtler but perhaps more significant influence whose methods appear on a deeper level to have guided Hemingway's fundamental approaches to his craft. Biographers discussing Hemingway's style frequently focus on comments from his early postwar years in Paris described in A Moveable Feast when, wrestling with the recalcitrant start of a new short story, Hemingway in frustration would reassure himself: All you have to do is write true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know (12). But he soon found that was not enough, for as he labored on the stories that would comprise In Our Time, he would walk almost daily to the Musee du Luxembourg to absorb its Cezannes:(2) was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions was trying to put in them. was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides[,] it was a secret. (13) In keeping with this secrecy, Hemingway - admitting almost facetiously that I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when was hungry (69) - never identified specific works of Cezanne that had influenced his own creative vision. Nevertheless, he would use a varied palette of this artist's techniques in areas ranging far beyond the large-scale conceptual approaches to landscapes that have already been noted by scholars. While an article of this length cannot serve as an exhaustive study of the full spectrum of Cezanne techniques appearing throughout Hemingway's oeuvre, it can - in passages from selected short stories and novels - show how representative paintings by Cezanne embody a range of methods that Hemingway incorporated into his writing, significantly strengthening the symbolic impact of his narrative point of view, setting, and character focus. COINCIDENTAL LIFE PARALLELS, INTENTIONALLY BORROWED TECHNIQUES On the surface, the lives of these two men share coincidental but relevant similarities. Neither received encouragement from his family. Cezanne's parents felt he had little talent, his strict father insisting that Paul continue in law school even though he wanted to begin painting full time. Hemingway faced a domineering mother (that bitch, he called her [qtd. in Lynn 27]) who for several years had dressed him as a twin to his sister Marcelline and later vehemently complained that his gift of an early copy of The Sun Also Rises had struck both parents as one of the filthiest books of the year (Lynn 357). For support, Cezanne would turn to Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard;(3) Hemingway would confide in Pound, Stein, and Perkins. Both have also left us a number of revealing serf-portraits. Like the more than 30 completed during Cezanne's ensuing career, Hemingway's war vignettes, safari adventures, and Nick Adams stories present a similar selection of self-explorations. Furthermore, artist and author approached their work with equivalent intensity. After 115 sittings, Cezanne felt that although he had acceptably depicted the shirtfront of Ambroise Vollard (Clay 223), the remainder of the portrait was not progressing: he threw it out. In addition, the considerable challenge of trying to capture the varied aspects of Mont Sainte-Victoire's solidity and permanence required 60 canvases.(4) And for his part, when the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms failed to coalesce, Hemingway rewrote the last page 39 times. To George Plimpton's query concerning the nature of the problem, Hemingway retorted, Getting the words right (qtd. …

Representing the Last Judgement: Social Hierarchy, Gender and Sin

This article analyses painted representations of the Last Judgement in medieval Italian art. These large frescoes provided religious education to viewers and furnished a set of rules and norms governing social conduct. Verdicts imposed on recognisable groups of persons are examined to uncover ways in which political, social and gender hierarchies were prescribed and reaffirmed. In contrast to earlier representations, the depiction of Hell in this art focuses on the consequences of the verdict. Female sexuality in general and certain forms of male sexual offences such as the transgression of the vows of asceticism by monks, or sodomy are central to punishments. The spoken and unspoken norms of late medieval urban life were legitimised as divine verdicts in these representations, now endowed with a powerful normative significance.

Masterpiece and Mass Product

Spanning the course of three millennia, the art of ancient Egypt stands out for its unique continuity. The fundamental rules of Pharaonic art were established around 3000 bc. The proportions of the human body, the style of cubist representation in relief and painting, the division of a tomb or temple wall into strips, and the adaptation of diverse forms into simple hieroglyphic images remained the principle elements of Egyptian art until the Imperial Roman era.

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (review)

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (review)

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting

The double screen: medium and representation in Chinese painting

This is an original book which is skilfully conceived to interweave theoretical exploration with art-historical writing. The book tackles a big question: what is a (traditional Chinese) painting? Wu Hung rejects either an intrinsic analysis of style and iconography or an extrinsic study of cultural and sociopolitical contexts, which both equate a painting with a pictorial representation. Pursuing an integrative perspective of medium and representation, Wu Hung highlights the missing dimension of painting's physical form by focussing on screen images in Chinese art history. Differing from Western scientific perception, the screen is one of the pictorial signs or formats to structure space in Chinese painting and is thus found as a popular pictorial motif throughout Chinese art history. This comprehensive analysis around screen thus becomes a writing of art history that delineates a line of Chinese art development from the Han to Qing dynasties, a period of about two thousand years (from a time shortly before the Christian Era to the 1800s).By focussing on three famous paintings with screen images from the Southern Tang (AD 937-75), a regime during the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Nations, the book examines the screen's diverse forms and roles by tracing backward and forward the historical development of each specific type of pictorial representation, its unique mode of perception, and its particular configuration of cultural space in Chinese art history. The author first problematizes the traditional reading of Chinese painting by deconstructing Gu Hongzhong's Night Entertainment of Han Xizai. Wu Hung breaks the myth of textual enclosures of both the external (stories and anecdotes) and the internal (colophons) surrounding the famous paintings, which blocks a fresh look at the original work. Instead, he strives to access the visual narrative in the original painting by defining the historicity of the various textual enclosures and investigating the complex relationships between the painted images and life, and between the images of related paintings. Unlike the screen images in Night Entertainment which help construct a spatial/temporal program and regulate the audience's perception in this long handscroll painting, the screen in Wang Qihan's short handscroll Collating Texts plays a different role, around which the author introduces a history of the landscape screen and raises the issue of masculine self-imaging. …