Western Painting Research Articles

Multilayer Inpainting on Digitalized Artworks

Image inpainting automatically restores damaged images and partially removed pictures. Since most inpainting mechanisms inpaint damaged portions in a single layer, this study proposes a multilayer inpainting mechanism by examining how Chinese paintings are drawn in layers. The proposed multilayer inpainting mechanism employs a layer fusion strategy to detect the optimal inpaint combination among layers to restore paintings. Because this multilayer multi-resolution strategy considers damages in each layer from a multi-resolution perspective, it is superior to several existing techniques for restoring Chinese and Western paintings. In this study, the proposed algorithm is tested on more than 1,500 still images, with evaluations showing the effectiveness of image inpainting. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves high PSNR values as well as high user satisfactions, including inpainting in some extreme cases where more than ninety percent of a painting are destroyed.

Vision, reflection, and desire in Western painting

Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illustion in the development of Western painting from Hellenistic Greece to the present. Using examples from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, David Summers argues that scene-painting (architectural backdrops) and shadow-painting (in which forms are modeled or shown as if in relation to a source of light) not only evolved in close association with geometric optics toward the end of the fifth century B.C.E., but also contributed substantially to the foundations of the new science. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected, and refracted is evident in the works of artists such as Brunelleschi, van Eyck, Alberti, and Leonardo. The interplay between optics and painting that influenced the course of Western art, Summers says, persisted as a framework for the realism of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Goya and continues today in modern photography and film.

Stochastic modeling western paintings for effective classification

As one of the most important cultural heritages, classical western paintings have always played a special role in human live and been applied for many different purposes. While image classification is the subject of a plethora of related publications, relatively little attention has been paid to automatic categorization of western classical paintings which could be a key technique of modern digital library, museums and art galleries. This paper studies automatic classification on large western painting image collection. We propose a novel framework to support automatic classification on large western painting image collections. With this framework, multiple visual features can be integrated effectively to improve the accuracy of identification process significantly. We also evaluate our method and its competitors based on a large image collection. A careful study on the empirical results indicates the approach enjoys great superiority over the state-of-the-art approaches in different aspects.

An Analysis on the Influence of Line in Chinese and Western Painting on Visual Shaping Language

The line of western painting, a rational painting element possessing the meaning of interpretation, is in pursuit of shaping and creating exact outer body shapes; the line of Chinese painting, besides delineating body shapes, stresses the spatial organization relationship of lines. The line of Chinese painting contains independent aesthetic value, “lines are for shaping” and conveys philosophy concept of eastern culture “the union of heaven and humans”. This paper helps readers to understand and master historical development process of line in Chinese and western painting and compares and describes the differences and similarities of line in western and eastern art and their influences on visual shaping language.

Lapis Lazuli in an Enigmatic ‘Purple7rsquo; Pigment from a Thirteenth-Century BC Greek Wall Painting

This paper presents the first evidence of lapis lazuli or lazurite that was detected unexpectedly using micro-Raman spectroscopy during research to identify an enigmatic purple hue on the thirteenth-century BC Greek Bronze Age wall paintings from Gla. The lapis lazuli material was found as part of a mixture including a red iron oxide and an as yet unidentified purple staining material. Existing purple mixtures of that period are also discussed. The identification of lapis lazuli at Gla may prove to be the earliest known use of this pigment in buon fresco, in both Eastern and Western painting traditions. Furthermore, this precedes the next known use of the material as a pigment by 1800 years. The existence of this blue pigment is also discussed within the context of the blue pigment palette of the Bronze Age Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age (3300–1100 BC), to show its use in relation to other blue materials and to demonstrate the technology and knowledge mastered by the artists who used this lazurite.

Nihonga Meets Gu Kaizhi: A Japanese Copy of a Chinese Painting in the British Museum

In a vexing moment in the reception history of a Chinese art treasure in the British Museum, two Japanese Nihonga masters, Kobayashi Kokei and Maeda Seison. copied the Admonitions of the Court Instructress (Nüshi zhen tujuan) picture scroll attributed to the figural master Gu Kaizhi (ca. 344-ca. 406). Considered globally, the long-ignored transcription, made in and at the behest of the museum in 1923, illustrated the effects of world politics on art. Locally, the experience of copying the Chinese masterpiece had a major impact on the artistic development of the copyists, sent to Europe to study Western painting techniques.

The Use of Egyptian Blue and Lapis Lazuli in the Middle Ages - The Wall Paintings of the San Saba Church in Rome

In the wall paintings of the church of San Saba (Rome), dating to the first half of the eighth century AD, Egyptian blue and lapis lazuli have been detected mixed together within the same pictorial layer. These are the oldest western paintings where lapis lazuli has been used as a blue pigment. This paper cites other instances of the use of lapis lazuli in ninth-century paintings and of Egyptian blue in late mediaeval paintings. Thus the dates for the commencement of the use of lapis lazuli and the discontinuation of Egyptian blue are significantly modified. Furthermore, the occurrence of both of these blue pigments in the San Saba wall paintings proves that the change from one to the other did not occur suddenly and that these two pigments were used concurrently in the same geographical context.

L'explicite et l'incommunicable : interprétations picturales du sublime

The definitions of the sublime given by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant are examined in order to see how they may provide an insight into the evolution of Western painting from its figurative to its abstract forms, through examples drawn from British Romantic art and American abstract expressionism.

“Aren’t you cool, you can scribble illegibly on toilet walls”

“Aren’t you cool, you can scribble illegibly on toilet walls”

Narrative and narrativity: A narratological reconceptualization and its applicability to the visual artsI

Among the many reorientations which the past century has brought about in the field of knowledge we have also witnessed what has been called the ‘narrativist turn’.2 This turn is evident in the increased attention that narratives and their characteristic quality, narrativity, have met with over the past few decades in a surprisingly large number of cultural practices. The table of contents of a volume edited by Cristopher Nash, Narrative in Culture,3 lists, for instance, economics, law, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature — and this is only a selection of the discourses that have been associated with narrativity. In addition, one may mention autobiography (for obvious reasons), historiography,4 ‘natural history’ including geology and biology (an example of which is the series of booklets The Story Behind the Scenery devoted to explaining the geological, biological and cultural backgrounds of US National Parks and Monuments) and, moreover, the so-called ‘natural narratives’ of oral everyday onversation,5 film6 and even architecture7 and music8. There are in fact so many fields in which narrative is said to play a role that Michael Toolan's sweeping statement, ‘[n] arratives are everywhere’,9 hardly sounds like an exaggeration. This is also true of art history. Here ‘narrative’ is a current concept, too, as can, for instance, be seen in the writings of Ernst Gombrich, for whom there has been a ‘constant interaction between narrative intent’ and illusionist ‘pictorial realism’ since the classical ‘Greek revolution’,10 or of Svetlana Alpers, who takes it for granted that post-classical Western painting was predominantly narrative from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.11

A Pedagogy of Two Ways of Seeing: A Confrontation of "Word and Image" in My Name is Red

The novel of Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, recently the center of controversy, not only in its homeland Turkey but in all the countries where it was translated, focuses on the debates around image-making in late sixteenth-century Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital. It is also a contemporary tale. Its focus is not only the tradition of miniature painting during the Ottoman period in particular, but also the tradition of Western painting. Above all, My Name is Red is a detective and love story, starting with a murder and resolving the mystery at the end, like many other novels in this genre. What is unique is the role that the confrontation of different traditions of painting, Western and Islamic, and that between "word and image" play in the resolution of the love story and the solving of the mystery. The tradition of miniature painting, the illumination and illustration of narrative texts, which legitimized itself as the art of the book, may be interpreted as a way of dealing with the iconoclastic tradition of Islam. In this context, images are not seen as things-in-themselves but they are treated as "footnotes" even when the image seems to dominate the written word on the page. Image-making becomes an extension of the text, rather than an independent art. It serves the purposes of the words for a better understanding of the meaning, for a description of the aura of the narration, for the depiction of the images the reader of the story will paint in the mind's eye. Images, it has been said, do not represent real life; they are an externalization of the inner life. Thus, contrary to meaning and interpretation in Western art, the meaning in Islamic illumination is "inwards, converging on a private truth" rather than disclosing itself with an "outwards movement"3 Such a way of seeing is a totally different story than the discipline of art history traditionally allows:

Encounters

The photographs by the British artist Roger Palmer, illustrated in this issue, take us to places such as South Africa, Canada, Scotland and Ireland, but in ways quite distinct from photojournalism. Palmer uses shallow spatial arrangements and a dialogue with many forms of art -- his own wall drawings, vernacular art, abstract art and also western European painting --to make unpeopled images that imply some of the difficulties of cultural negotiation. The viewer is placed in an encounter with surfaces, reflections, traces of wear and tear from passing humans and signs that they have left, both legible and illegible.

New Resource for University Lecturers

Books reviewed in this section:Sarah Carr‐Gomm Dictionary of Symbols in Art: The Illustrated Key to Western Painting and Sculpture Live Live Live in Your Head

Brushed Voices: Calligraphy in Contemporary China (review)

Reviewed by: Brushed Voices: Calligraphy in Contemporary China Veronica de Jong (bio) Yiguo Zhang . Brushed Voices: Calligraphy in Contemporary China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. 154 pp. 64 illustrations (11 repeated in color). Paperback $30.00, ISBN 1-884919-06-5. Although many Americans are privileged to have access to museums housing fine examples of Chinese calligraphy from various dynastic periods, examples by modern calligraphers are not readily available or frequently exhibited. The diversity of artistic developments in China's contemporary calligraphy is particularly fascinating, for many of these artists continue to practice a very old art form that was, for about fifteen hundred years, the hallmark of elite members of society. There are those, however, who challenge its conventions or reinterpret this ancient art form. We are unable to chart the developments in this flourishing practice from abroad, and so it is fortunate that Yiguo Zhang, a citizen of China and practicing calligrapher, has endeavored to celebrate and discuss China's recent calligraphic history through this book. Brushed Voices is a catalog of an exhibition that was held at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, in 1998. The exhibition was organized by Yiguo Zhang with the help of others and includes twenty-one prominent and well-established calligraphers. Many of them hold very important and influential positions in universities, calligraphy associations, and journals on calligraphy, and there are some artists who have studied Western art, including a few who have studied abroad. Zhang's introductory essay discusses the burgeoning interest in the art of calligraphy by citizens of all ages and backgrounds. Equally diverse are the artistic directions this art form has taken in recent years. They range from traditional interpretations of ancient scripts and styles to questioning the very heart of the art form itself—asking, for example, whether or not Chinese characters are even necessary. Sun Xiaoyun, one of two female calligraphers included in the catalog, maintains a traditional approach, modeling her writing on esteemed masters of the past, remaining within the boundaries that have traditionally demarcated conventional Chinese writing, such as balanced character composition and correct stroke order. In contrast, Bai Di's work titled Noncharacter Calligraphy is a [End Page 571] playful piece that challenges traditional practices. In this work, forms that appear to be characters are in fact assemblages of calligraphic strokes that are illegible, yet they are arranged in columns as though they are readable text. Another artist, Luo Qi, defies accepted conventions in a more controversial manner. In some of his works he denies traditional calligraphic strokes and characters entirely, adopting instead a "universal line" that forms abstract images. The strong Western abstract-painting quality of Luo Qi's work differs from other works that explore the relationship between traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy that has had a long history in China. Several artists investigate the art of the calligraphic line through landscape or figure painting. For instance, in Liu Zhengcheng's Magnolias, the brushstrokes that describe a profusion of buds exhibit qualities shared by calligraphic strokes. The sixty-four works included in this catalog are all illustrated in black and white, with eleven reproduced a second time in color toward the end of the book. Each artist is briefly introduced and his or her works are all translated and discussed in varying detail. Some descriptions of the calligraphy are entirely formal while others consider the artistic development and context that define a calligrapher's work. Conveniently appended to the back of the book are transcriptions of each work of art in traditional Chinese characters. The brief descriptions of each artist are also provided in Chinese. Zhang has, moreover, included a bibliography of superb English and Chinese books and articles that may interest those who wish to read more about Chinese calligraphy. An interview with the American artist Brice Marden is appended to the end of the catalog. Unfortunately, the artist is not given an introduction. Marden, who lives in New York, was born in 1938 and is an abstract painter who has been influenced by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. During the years 1988 to 1992 he worked on a series of paintings called Cold Mountain, which draws on his study...

The Art and Artiface of Peter Greenaway

The Art and Artifice of Peter Greenaway Anthony Enns Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. It is significant that the subtitle of Alan Woods’ new book, Being Naked Playing Dead, is not “The Films of...” or “The Cinema of...” but rather “The Art of Peter Greenaway.” “Artist” is certainly a more accurate description of Greenaway’s occupation than “filmmaker”; while he is widely known as one of today’s most brilliant and unique filmmakers, he has also worked in the mediums of painting, installations, experimental television, and opera. Woods’ subtitle not only indicates this fact, but also makes clear that Greenaway’s films must be considered in light of his wider body of work, and, more importantly, that his work must be considered within the context of contemporary art rather than contemporary cinema. As Woods points out: “Greenaway’s cinema requires a critical analysis which is not restricted to cinema, but draws its terms and concepts and examples both from the history of Western painting since the Renaissance... and from a base within the very different world of contemporary art practice” (87). Through his in-depth understanding of salient issues in contemporary art and his ability to decipher the wealth of influences and references at play within the works themselves, Woods distills the complexities of Greenaway’s art into a cohesive aesthetic theory, an outline for a “new cinematic language.” He constructs a fascinating portrait of Greenaway’s working method as well as illustrates a potentially new method of film criticism. Part of what makes Greenaway’s films unique is the way they address the medium of film itself. Greenaway is obsessed with the difficulties of representing reality on film, and this problem becomes focused on representations of the body. As Greenaway explains: “[there are] two phenomena I have never been able to suspend disbelief about in the cinema—copulation and death” (52). Copulation and death are the two subjects addressed by Woods’ title, and they are particularly significant to Greenaway because they mark the limit of representation, the limit of film’s ability to represent the physical world. According to Woods, naked bodies, which are ubiquitous in Greenaway’s films, are linked to mortality: “Our interest in the nude, he suggests, is more than sexual: it is also to do with our knowledge of our own mortality. Many of the bodies he shows us are dead, or at least... acting dead” (162). It is paradoxical that Greenaway’s method of addressing the artifice of film is actually a project of connecting viewers to something more genuine: the experience of their own bodies, their mortality, the human condition. Greenaway recognizes the inability of “dominant” cinema to convey this experience because of its strict adherence to narrative; narrative is unable to remind people that they are mortal, and this is why Greenaway advocates a new cinema, a “cinema of ideas, not plots.” Jorge Luis Borges once said that the short story did not necessarily require a plot, but rather a “situation,” and it is this word that appears in Woods’ text in place of plot: “the situation, however artificial, becomes difficult to bear because it must be thought about rather than consumed/resolved through narrative” (201). Narratives fail because they resolve tension, whereas Greenaway uses tension to evoke thought. Narrative relies on character identification, on the viewer’s empathy with the plight of the protagonist, but Greenaway rejects such a notion: “Empathy... prevents us from dealing with, facing up to, what is really real” (176). This repositioning of the viewer in relation to the work of art is almost Brechtian, except that Greenaway’s project does not encourage political awareness so much as an awareness of the operations of nature; according to Woods, Greenaway disrupts narrative from a “Darwinian standpoint.” However, it would be wrong to interpret Greenaway’s emphasis on nature as an attempt to evoke a spiritual or a transcendent experience. Woods describes Greenaway’s use of cinematic artifice as an attempt to combine Brechtian as well as Baroque theatricality (the Baroque aesthetic combines soul and body, the spiritual and the material): “It is not spirituality which is co-existent...

The History of Western Painting:

The History of Western Painting:

Creativity in Horizontal and Vertical Domains

Traditionally creativity has been examined based on the creator-centered model, and it has been assumed that creativity is the same across all knowledge domains. This article presents an argument that challenges the traditional view: Creativity is also shaped by the structural constraints a domain places on the process of creativity. To explore how domain constraints are related to creativity, 2 types of domains are distinguished. Horizontal domains allow novelty to occur in all dimensions, resulting in divergent developments of the domain. Vertical domains, in contrast, possess certain stable elements that are existentially fundamental to the domain, thus permitting alteration only around certain dimensions. The horizontality and verticality of domains are examined in this article through 5 structural parameters identifiable in a domain: the aim; methods; symbol systems and uses; rules; and standards of quality. Modem Western and traditional Chinese ink brush painting are used as comparative examples for the illustration of the theory.

Surgery as satire

“This is my body…This is my Software” is an exhibition by the French artist Orlan. It has, as they say, succeeded in stimulating a debate. One comment in the visitors' book berates a “sick, bitter, twisted, sad excuse for an artist (if that's what you call an ugly bitch).” It isn't hard to see why this 10 year project is controversial—it involves a series of operations (performed, by the use of satellite link ups, in front of an international audience) designed to remodel Orlan's face. Thanks to the attentions of her surgeons, most of her features are now recognisable from classic Western paintings. The gallery is …

The dictionary of symbols in Western art

Illustrated with specially commissioned line drawings, this comprehensive A-to-Z guide is invaluable to the understanding and appreciation of Western painting and sculpture.

Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1908

Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1908