Series Of Paintings Research Articles

The Habsburg Portrait Galleries in Graz Castle and Karlau Manor in the 17th and 18th Centuries

The article discusses portrait galleries established by Arch- duke Charles II and Archduchess Maria around 1600 and stored in Graz Castle and Karlau Castle near Graz until the 18th century. The collections are analyzed based on published archival sources. Several unique portrait series are presented, as well as the artists and the works of art, which are now kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The commissioners’ practices and collecting endeavors associated with the accumulation of family portraits are explained. In addition, the article discusses the role of the portrait series of Roman emperors and a series of costume paintings, which were also included in the collection.

The mathematician, the Surrealist, and the poet are of imagination all compact: Man Ray’s Shakespearean Equations

Man Ray’s series of paintings entitled Shakespearean Equations remains largely unknown even today, despite the artist’s fame. Perhaps that is partly because, like many Surrealist works, it so stubbornly resists interpretation; it is difficult to even grasp what one is looking at. The paintings depict mathematical models and their only Shakespearean characteristics are their titles, taken directly from Shakespeare’s canon. Nevertheless, I argue that a fruitful analysis is possible by understanding the pictures in relation to Shakespeare’s texts, the reception of Shakespeare in the twentieth century, and the reception of non-Euclidean geometry in artistic circles at the time. My study thus hinges on an assessment of the context in which Man Ray produced these works. But it also takes a closer look at two paintings in the series, uncovering the textual and pictorial sources they reference, parsing the layers of meaning which are thus built up. This paper does not set itself the impossible task of producing a definitive interpretation, which would, among other things, be contrary to the Surrealist spirit. I rather hope to explore what this particular act of appropriation uncovers about the reception of Shakespeare and mathematics.

Landscapes of Play

Landscapes of Play is a series of paintings that seek to evoke dreamy, distant and warm memories of childhood. They both embody a longing for the past, and are haunted by it, producing a bitter sweetness in the act of remembering childhood.

Fungal conservation and ancient Egyptians- Part 2: A spiritual heritage of a look

Egypt is the cradle of civilization and mycology. Drawing fungi is one of the joys of mycology, and something that anybody can try. Art has been a part of mycology since earliest times and published in many international journals and books. Line drawings are essential for showing details of fungal structure, whether in a field guide or fungal monographs. Ancient Egyptians produced a number of hieroglyphic depictions of psychedelic mushrooms on temples and through hieroglyphic texts throughout the country. A new attractive tool to raise national and international awareness on fungal conservation is drawing of fungi in many attractive portraits as ancient Egyptians documented them everywhere. In this series of paintings I participated with these portraits to attract young mycologists in MENA and to apply a new tool for conserving fungi.

Savoldo’s Magdalene: “True Reformations Are Internal”

The subject of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo’s series of Magdalene paintings has long been a matter of debate. Looking at the series in the context of the reform movement in Venice in the 1520s and 1530s, when Christ’s resurrection could be viewed metaphorically, this article aims to demonstrate that Savoldo adopts a number of motifs to convey the idea of a renewing of life, which identify “Mary” as the mother. The case made here is that Savoldo’s paintings move beyond representation to the actual process of transformation, with an experiential function where the beholder was an active participant and narrative function was subordinated.

Sic vita est: Visual representation in painting of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY

Abstract This article analyzes how the conceptualization LIFE IS A JOURNEY is conveyed within a series of paintings ranging from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century. While the previous research on visual metaphor generally aims to describe how the domains of metaphorical conceptualization interact or discusses the rhetorical effect that visual metaphor is able to induce, this article takes a historical perspective in order to identify the main conceptual aspects shared by the paintings under consideration. It is proposed that the concept of a JOURNEY is associated with a PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY that involves the start of the journey and its termination as two qualitatively different moments that are faced as a collective/shared experience and that are inspired by some human wish. This article also shows how the conceptual potential of metaphor tends to maintain a coherent representation although the paintings represent different historical sensitivities and artistic approaches.

Fungal conservation and ancient Egyptians- Part 1: A spiritual heritage of a look

Egypt is the cradle of civilization and mycology. Drawing fungi is one of the joys of mycology, and something that anybody can try. Art has been a part of mycology since earliest times and published in many international journals and books. Line drawings are essential for showing details of fungal structure, whether in a field guide or fungal monographs. Ancient Egyptians produced a number of hieroglyphic depictions of psychedelic mushrooms on temples and through hieroglyphic texts throughout the country. A new attractive tool to raise national and international awareness on fungal conservation is drawing of fungi in many attractive portraits as ancient Egyptians documented them everywhere. In this series of paintings I participated with these portraits to attract young mycologists in MENA and to apply a new tool for conserving fungi.

A Never‐Ending Painting: The Generosity of Time Spent Making and Learning with Others through Artistic Research

AbstractThis article examines the role of spending time with others in and through artistic research and practice. I draw from my doctoral work which took me on a cross‐Canada journey visiting 125 artists in their studios. Following the studio visits, I made a series of paintings of artists’ studios, however a year later these same paintings were cut up and rearranged to create collaborative studio assemblages on the walls of the Tate Exchange Gallery in Liverpool. Drawing on the metaphor of a never‐ending‐painting to examine never‐ending pedagogies, this article examines the evolution of this project through three iterations of the studio paintings. With each iteration, I explore different ways of knowing others through making thus proposing the performative and relational qualities of artistic research. The first iteration allowed me to spend time with artists even in their absence, as I engaged with our conversations through painting their studios, thus blurring the lines between solitary and social art practices. The second iteration allowed me to give up my art to others through asking them to create collages with fragments of my studio paintings. And the third iteration allowed my work to merge with other arts‐based researchers. Through this process, I propose that making art allows for multiple conversations to emerge through spending time getting to know others through art making.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Black Place”

During World War II, Georgia O’Keeffe created a series of foreboding paintings of New Mexico’s Bisti Badlands, which she named the “Black Place.” Produced within a wartime image ecosystem in which photographs, films, and cartography vividly communicated the power of air war to obliterate humanity and nature, O’Keeffe’s “Black Place” series grappled with the war’s destruction and shifts in perceptions of time, distance, and place. In its tense engagement with a new technological and visual world, the Black Place series finds kindship with the art of the bourgeoning generation of Expressionists.

Lucas Grogan and the Eroticism of Aboriginal Art

In a series of paintings dating from 2008, artist Lucas Grogan attracted the ire of artists and curators for appropriating Arnhem Land rock art motifs. These works, including Yeah Babe, Its Been A ...

In-situ technical study of modern paintings - Part 2: Imaging and spectroscopic analysis of zinc white in paintings from 1889 to 1940 by Alessandro Milesi (1856-1945).

We present a multi-analytical in situ non-invasive study of a series of emblematic paintings by Alessandro Milesi (1856-1945) from the collection of the International Gallery of Modern Art Ca' Pesaro in Venice. Eight paintings dated from 1897 to 1910 were studied with imaging and spectroscopic techniques. White pigments were characterized by a combination of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy which traced the presence of zinc-based pigments in Milesi's paintings, Raman Spectroscopy, Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) Spectroscopy and Time-resolved Luminescence Imaging. Time-resolved analysis of luminescence emissions revealed the nanosecond emission from organic compounds and the slower emission from the luminescent inorganic pigment Zinc Oxide that varied between 1.1 and 1.6 microseconds. In this work, data regarding the distribution of luminescent pigments was acquired with a time-gated imaging detector. Furthermore, differences in emission decay kinetics recorded from different paintings can be ascribed to different paint formulations or origins of the Zinc white in paint.

Visual Essay

The first five images are collages-montages where I use collage as at once a technique of the construction of form but also as a mode of inquiry on what is in the process of being made and that the viewer is in the process of seeing (future perfect). The last five images are taken from a diagram that I began in 1994 whose task is a simple classification articulating a chronological series of paintings with the syntagma of written propositions (conceptual, metaphoric or historical) and historical works – drawn, painted or sculpted. Since then, the diagram has been developed in a specific way; it has become a dispositif not only because new columns of time have been added but especially because the interaction between the written and the painted leads to a certain number of disruptions, in such a way that the dispositif has substituted its own specific temporal and paradoxical propositions for the chronological fatality of origins.

The Chinese Diaspora in Canada

In this project, research is conducted through alternative research methodologies like artistic and visual research. The Chinese Diaspora and the themes pertaining to the topic are inquired through the investigation of archival images from the late 19th to early 20th century. The artist, as researcher, used the digital databases of Library and Archives Canada to conduct visual research on the Chinese Diaspora. The artist then uses historical images as a starting point for artistic research which questions the attitudes in which Chinese communities have been viewed by mainstream Canadian society and how such sentiments fit into Canadian whiteness and Canadian multiculturalism. Using both, painting and printmaking in her practice, Law examines historical images of the Chinese-Canadian diaspora’s history to investigate her own experiences as a racialized person and connects both historical and contemporary attitudes surrounding diversity. The process of artistic research is then presented as a series of print and paintings, cumulated in the 2019 Union Gallery installation, Unassimilable.

‘… With a Book in Your Hands’: A Reflection on Imaging, Reading, Space, and Female Agency

The Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), created a series of singular paintings that might be identified as feminine soliloquies of solitude, silence, and space. Like seeing, reading is a mediated practice that occurs within the cultural matrix that promotes the appropriate social mores of how to read, what to read, and who is able to read. Over the millennia of Western cultural history, books have been ambiguous symbols of power that have signified authorship, divine inspiration, wisdom, social position, and literacy. This led to the initiation of a singular Christian form of literature—the advice manual—specifically prepared for Christian women by Jerome (347–420), perhaps best known as one of the church fathers, translator of the Vulgate, and penitential saint. Simultaneously, an iconography of women reading evolved from these theological advisories, and paralleled the history of women’s literacy, particularly within Western Christian culture. The dramatic division that has always existed between male readers and female readers was highlighted during the Reformation when Protestant artists recorded the historical reality that readers were predominantly men of all ages but only old women, that is, those women who were relieved form the duties of childbearing and housekeeping, and who, as a form of spiritual preparation for death, meditated upon the scriptures. The magisterial art historian Leo Steinberg documented the tradition of what he termed “engaged” readers in Western art. Engaged male readers dominated numerically over female readers as reading, Steinberg determined, was not a primary, or perhaps better said appropriate, activity for women. Yet Vermeer’s portrayal of a young woman absorbed in textual engagement with a letter was an exquisitely nuanced visual immediacy of intimacy merging with reality that was highlighted by a refined light that illumined the soft, diffuse ambiance of this woman’s world. How Vermeer was able to focus the viewer’s attention on his female subject and her innermost thoughts as she is “lost in space” reading provides a starting point of this discussion of the images, reading, space, and female agency in Christian and in secular art.

Creativity and pedagogical activity of Professor V. Bystriakova

V. Bystriakov – Honored Worker of Arts of Ukraine, member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, creative work is well-known to the general public, and teaching activity occupies an important place in the work of the department of drawing of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. In the work of the artist, he combined his own experience and achievements of artists of past generations, it has always been and is open to creative experiments. His creative pursuits and teaching methods are important for understanding the history of artistic education, in particular the teaching of the drawing, since it reflects the main directions and peculiarities of artistic education of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. In his work V. Bystriakov determined that the minimum means can be achieved maximum expressiveness, to achieve a strong life experience in the work. His paintings are characterized by ease, transparency, artistry of performance, understanding of the proportion of proportion and composition. Professor V. Bystryakov's pedagogical credo is a responsible attitude to his work, professionalism in any field of occupation – whether it is drawing or painting. The main objective of the teacher in the mandatory requirements of the classical school, he believes, is to enable the student to identify his own creative vision of a task. The main thing is not to «kill» the desire to create. Among students V. Bystriakov a teachers of the academy M. Kochubei, V. Kyrychenko, Yu. Maistrenko-Vakulenko, who already convey their creative experience to students. A special place in the work of V. Bystriakov is dedicated to the Chernobyl tragedy. The tragic event for Ukraine and the world has brought to life a cycle of pictures: «Girlfriends», «When the birds do not sing», «Evacuation», «Bright still life in the dark room», «The cry of Jeremiah», «And the third angel sounded», «Sunflowers», «Spas», and also a series of paintings «And fell on the star of the earth». In each work the cycle has its own language, artistic means, its philosophical interpretation, is subject to the disclosure of the main theme – Chornobyl. V. Bystriakova's creativity characterizes him as a talented master with personal beliefs and views. He does not stay away from the problems of modern life, in particular the ecology of the environment, touches in his works important issues that make us think over the routine of life processes, through the extrapolation of the inner sense and understanding of reality. He inspires reflections on the present in his various spiritual and social aspects. Knows good and evil through the prism of confession of the soul. Combining and interweaving the images of fictional illusions and real heroes, generalizes and reproduces the experience gained in his works. The artist's paradigm is based on the principles of symbolism and surrealism. In the principles and approaches of the author to the creation of works can be traced laconic language of poster art. Using various authoring techniques, he reveals to the viewer his tension and a peculiar vision of the world, reflects internal excitement, experiences, painful. The existence in works of the existence, embodied in details and symbols, prompts philosophical reflections on life, the search for truth, comprehension and perception of the viability of nature. V. Bystriakov is an artist and a teacher, who, through a practical component, passes on his experience to students nowadays.

The rise of art movements: an effectual process model of Picasso’s and Braque’s give-and-take during the creation of Cubism (1908–1914)

Cubism was the most influential movement in modern art, and Pablo Picasso transformed the art world like no other figure before him. Changes in institutional and market conditions have been until now mainstream explanations for the emergence of art movements such as Cubism. However, we argue that there are complementary explanations centered on the agency of the artists themselves and based on entrepreneurial decision-making processes, in particular on the theory of effectuation. We have analyzed the detailed accounts of art history experts to generate a longitudinal process model of the creation of Cubism. Cubism emerged because Picasso and Braque transformed their common set of means into a variety of effects. Cubist innovations originated sequentially, as part of a chain of achievements. One innovation and artistic achievement led to another. Picasso and Braque’s methods of producing series of paintings and drawings and building upon previous achievements enrich our existing understanding of effectuation on a central point—the transformation of means into effects. This research also uncovers relationships among effectuation, bricolage, and subversion. This study illustrates how the theory of effectuation can be a method for the creation of new artifacts in fields beyond entrepreneurship and how effectuation can be a general-purpose decision-making schema for operating under conditions of uncertainty. The results of our study offer lessons of interest to scholars and practitioners in both art and entrepreneurship.

“The Spirit of the Moment”. Vrubel’s Demons: Impulse and Construction

This article analyses the demonic in M. Vrubel’s art in the context of the “morbid phantasms” of European art in the last third of the nineteenth century. The authors argue that between 1870 and 1900, the traditional iconography of infernal beings created in religious art ceased to be relevant for European painting; the usual methods no longer worked. As paradoxical bodily structures and an emphasis on the heterogeneity of the parts of infernal creatures were part of a longstanding tradition, nineteenth-century painters could not ignore the heritage of antiquity. Only by combining folklore elements, literary plots, types of mass culture, and individual preferences (i. e. dreams and nightmares) was it possible to create an eclectic image of a monster sewn hastily from diverse parts (dismembered corpses), much like Frankenstein’s creation. Consequently, artists willing to create an image of a classic (ancient) monster had to express its fatality (fatal force), sensuality (femininity), featurelessness (invisibility), and suddenness (elusiveness). Vrubel persistently and consistently developed a programme where “the spirit of the moment” (as A. Losev called the ancient demon) would appear in all its manifold “beauty”. Vrubel’s Demons are not a series of paintings but a single major work in every sense of the word. The artist implements his creative programme consistently through various plastic solutions, but the orderly phases of work (which took the artist years to complete) were interrupted by flashes of spontaneous creativity. This impulse in Demons appears to be dialectically opposed to the project. A synthesis of these bases is what determines the originality of Vrubel’s programme, which became an authentic embodiment of the very idea of the demonic in its Hellenistic, ancient, and Christian forms.

Aguas profundas, aguas durmientes. Ricardo Warecki y el paisaje cultural del río

El agua y la naturaleza constituyeron asuntosreiterados en la producción artística de RicardoWarecki durante los años de entreguerras yde posguerra. El río Paraná se transforma enel argumento de escenarios donde predominala quietud de un paisaje en el que hombres ymujeres suspenden sus actividades cotidianas paradescansar. El artículo aborda la manera en queWarecki descubre e imagina su entorno cotidiano através de una serie de pinturas, dibujos y estampasque tienen por motivo escenarios naturales cuyosprotagonistas son el espacio del río y la barranca, losmedios rurales o la presencia de la arquitectura queocupa territorios que transforman el aspecto visibledel barrio y de la ciudad.

Orénoque as a Book of Cultural Protest: Fautrier’s Brutal Etchings Camouflaged by Ganzo’s Poetic River

Jean Fautrier’s eleven abstract etchings of the decapitated body and severed head, disguised as the flowing waters of a river in the artist’s book Orénoque are landmark symbols of protest at the wartime atrocities in France. Commissioned by French publisher Georges Blaizot during the German Occupation, Fautrier’s etchings transformed Robert Ganzo’s nostalgic poems of the rivers and forests of his Venezuelan childhood into an instrument of cultural resistance. Using the book as a vehicle and Ganzo’s poems as camouflage, Fautrier circumvented the barrier of fear and censorship of the Occupation. The text and images independently cohabited the same book space, each telling a different story, in a rendition of the modernist and “degenerate art” that had been condemned. This paper reveals the influence and timing of the socio-political events during the Second World War on the increased radicalisation of Fautrier’s art which led to the creation of the Orénoque images. This paper also establishes an aesthetic and symbolic link between the etchings in Orénoque and Fautrier’s landmark Les Otages series of resistance paintings and shows that they shared the same illustrative concepts of death and the dismembered body, and they convey the same message of protest. As such Orénoque represents an important milestone in the history of the French artist’s books and as a book of cultural protest during the German Occupation of France.

Safe distances and unbearable closeness: cliché representations of violence against women in Canada

ABSTRACTThis article analyses two visual representations of highly publicized cases of violence against women in Canada by drawing on innovative bridging of Gramsci’s hegemonic common sense and Deleuze’s cliché. I argue that as elements in the representational assemblage surrounding these cases, both cultural productions contributed to the construction of such acts of gendered violence as national events.Both images exploit the capacity of cliché to move images towards meaning and to move the audience into and out of affective proximity with those being represented. The first case study, a series of paintings by Pamela Masik entitled The Forgotten, fails to close the distance between the viewer and the marginalized women depicted. By contrast, the effect of cliché in the second case study, an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series, The Fifth Estate, is to create subjective distances, reinstating dominant common sense about the boundaries between strangers and neighbours and upholding the sanctity of the community. I highlight these images to demonstrate the role of cliché in conditioning and drastically limiting our ethical and political responses to violence against women. I conclude by attempting to add friction to the slippery surface of cliché, expanding the moments where representation fails. My contention is that spending more time in zones of incomprehension creates the potential for counterhegemonic memory-images to take hold.