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This section features the portrait paintings created by the author, artist Eugene Palmer, for his 2018 art exhibition "Didn't It Rain," that was presented at the James Hockey Gallery of the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham, England. Topics discussed include the capability of painting to address issues concerning cultural identity, the representation of the Black subjects of his paintings, and the narrative that said paintings intend to convey to the audience.

This article revisits the eighteenth-century pinturas de castas (caste painting) tradition by juxtaposing it with the artistic production of contemporary Latinx artist Michael Menchaca. Enigmatic and haunting, casta paintings blatantly reveal the workings of colonial miscegenation. The paintings have been interpreted as souvenirs for wealthy European patrons, as "exotica" for eclectic Wunderkammers, and as ethnographic confirmation of mestizaje (racial mixing). Regularly incorporated in art history courses and texts about global early modernisms, casta paintings are invoked as evidence of a deeply troubling colonial past in which racial taxonomies placed a hierarchical premium on "whiteness." Arguably one of the most important contemporary Latinx artists, Menchaca explicitly summons the canonical type in his suite of sixteen screen prints, La Raza Cósmica 20XX. Bold and graphically appealing, Menchaca's series visualizes the colonial sistema de castas (caste system) as a world populated by animal hybrids and surveilled by Big Tech. Menchaca's interpretation of and dialogue with the casta painting tradition calls attention to the endurance of casta thinking in the twenty-first century. By interrogating the multivalent layers of Menchaca's images alongside their early modern "sources," it is possible to better understand the mechanisms of a modern process of mestizaje. In this way, contemporary artists like Menchaca animate the art of the past and, as this essay suggests, redirect our art historical gaze toward a more just future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1982 the Polish American artist Jan Sawka executed an extraordinary painting, 15 Strange Things on the Clean Morning Sky. Contradicting the title, the sky depicted is covered with sketches and cryptic writing. This suggests a common hallucinatory experience had by pilots navigating an empty sky, the ganzfeld effect. When vision encounters any undifferentiated field, such as total darkness, it will create something to see, in the form of hallucinations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has asserted that hallucination is an integral part of visual perception: it is a kind of preseeing, which Jacques Lacan calls the screen. For Lacan, the screen is a "locus of mediation" between actual perceptions and the expectations or models that shape our seeing; it works without any conscious awareness on our part. This is not so with the "15 strange things" of Sawka's title: small, framed images in a dusky cluster near the top of the painting. Their subjects reflect three modes in which conscious thought is conceived out of the torrent of visual impressions: diagrams, words, and clouds. Sawka plays with the screen in various ways, making it visible in other works of his. His preoccupation with the nature of seeing is not confined to images from the material world but has implications as well for memory, fiction, and painting itself—since a canvas is also a screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1980s, Bridget Riley produced a series of paintings distinguished by their use of the same group of colours, said to have been inspired by the vividly preserved painted tombs that she encountered during a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1979–80. Though clearly related to the black‐and‐white paintings that propelled Riley to international fame in the 1960s, these new works represented a notable change in the artist's methods, combining an intuitive arrangement of colour with a simple compositional motif: the stripe. While determinedly abstract, the imaginative origins of Riley's stripe paintings are registered in many of the titles that they carry: Ka (1980); Ra (1981); Luxor (1982); Winter Palace (1981). This essay reconsiders the making, display and reception of Riley's so‐called 'Egyptian palette' within a longer history of encounter and exchange between Britain and Egypt, ranging across more than a century of military occupation and resistance, Cold War entrenchment, and neoliberal diplomacy. In doing so, it situates Riley's work between colonial and post‐colonial ways of seeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1855, the Pre-Raphaelite artist–poet Elizabeth Siddal was invited to examine John Ruskin's collection of medieval manuscripts. Two years later, a manuscript—a Book of Hours, the popular late medieval prayer-book—appeared in Siddal's painting Clerk Saunders. Siddal's decision to include a Book of Hours in a scene from a medieval ballad encourages us to explore the painting's creative strategies in new ways. This article examines how Clerk Saunders reinterprets the art of such prayer-books, focusing on Siddal's reworking of the Annunciation. I shall explore the collision between this visual iconography and the language of the ballads from which the subject is taken, and trace how this literary-inspired pictorial dismemberment unsettles the medievalism of other Pre-Raphaelite works. I will demonstrate how Siddal's disruptive medievalism is illuminated by queer theory; there have been queer readings of 'Siddal' the mythologized figure, but I will show how Siddal takes a queering approach to ballads and iconography in her art and poetry. My article will affirm Siddal's work with the Book of Hours as an important contribution to Pre-Raphaelite medievalism, which speaks to anxieties about the destabilizing power of nineteenth-century creativity, and the tempestuous relationship between words and images across historical periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was prompted by the discovery of three dozen portrait drawings by an anonymous Indian artist in Old Delhi's Chandni Chowk market. Some portraits, drawn in black pen and ink on paper and dating from around 1830, are framed by a caption, written in Devanagari script, apparently describing prominent figures in the Mughal court, following the British conquest of Delhi (1803). The first section focuses on the translated script of the captions around the portraits and provides some historical context to identify the subjects portrayed. It focuses on who they are. It also situates the portraits in relation to 'Company School' painting, i.e. work by eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century Indian artists adjusting their styles to paint subjects appealing to British (and European) taste. Attention shifts to portraits of British officials, possibly including Sir David Ochterlony, first Resident at the Mughal Court, 1803–06, and again, 1818–22, and Charles Metcalfe, 1811–18. The paper draws attention to the ways in which the artist distinguishes between Asian and European subjects, simultaneously coming to terms with the challenges of representing unfamiliar European ethnicities. The drawings themselves – historically interesting and occasionally amusing – are unique in relation to what is generally understood as 'Indian painting'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Transformations in Business & Economics is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During solvent cleaning of a painted surface, the control of solvent diffusion into the painting matrix is a primary concern for conservators. In this work, a comparative systematic study of solvent ingress and of the ensuing swelling phenomenon in paint films due to cleaning treatments was tackled using single-sided NMR. Specifically, the effects of a TAC aqueous solution (triammonium citrate in deionized water) applied in both free and gelled forms (by Klucel® G) on acrylic emulsion and vinyl-based model paints were evaluated. Notably, the NMR measurements (proton spin density depth profiles and transverse relaxation decays) collected before, during, and after these wet-cleaning tests proved that the use of the aqueous gel did not significantly minimize the penetration and the swelling action of water compared with the free solution. Furthermore, swelling effects associated with the use of an organic solvent (ligroin) were evaluated by NMR profilometry on varnished oil and egg-tempera paints. In this case, by comparing the depth profiles collected before and after the solvent treatments, a moderate paint swelling was observed followed by a width reduction of the paint films ascribable to the removed varnish layer. Overall, the reported NMR results reveal the analytical potentialities of the technique for a non-invasive assessment of the swelling effect of paint films subjected to cleaning (by water or an organic solvent), thereby providing an analytical method in support to the conservators' practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier work by one of us examined a historical corpus of portraits and found that artists often paint the subject such that one eye is centred horizontally. If due to psychological mechanisms constraining artistic composition, this eye-centring bias should be detectable also in portraits by non-professionals. However, this finding has been questioned both on theoretical and empirical grounds. Here we tested eye-centring in a larger (N ~ = 4000) and more representative set of selfies spontaneously posted on Instagram from six world cities. In contrast with previous selfie results, the distribution of the most-centred eye position peaked almost exactly at the horizontal centre of the image and was statistically different from predictions based on realistic Monte-Carlo predictions. In addition, we observed a small but statistically reliable pseudoneglect effect as well as a preference for centring the left-eye. An eye-centring tendency appears to exist in self-portraits by non-artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to list the possible associations that the painting depicting seven women fighting for a man's trousers by the Antwerp genre painter Hiëronymus Janssens (1624–1692) may have raised in the minds of the seventeenth-century (Antwerp) audience, by pointing out noteworthy iconographic deviations in Janssens' representations of the theme, and discussing the familiarity of his Antwerp audience with this theme. In view of the visual and the cultural-historical tradition of the topic, various interpretations and representations of the theme are linked to Janssens' painting. It turns out that Janssens was not only inspired by the contemporary printing tradition, but also that he has mainly stressed the comical and erotic aspects of the topic. It is argued that Janssens' choice to depict this amorous/erotic topic fits within the scope of his œuvre. In general, the case study provides us with a beautiful example of the exchange of visual imagery between French prints and Southern Netherlandish genre painting in the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the horseshoe crab in collections and paintings in early modern Antwerp. Such a crab is depicted in at least three paintings by the Antwerp artist Frans Francken the Younger – among the earliest European depictions of this animal and the first in the medium of oil paint. It is suggested that the crab depicted by Francken was probably in the collection of his acquaintance, the notary Gilles de Kimpe, one of the city's most avid collectors. Early modern Antwerp supported a lively collecting culture and people like Francken and De Kimpe were fascinated by the variety and abundance of nature. In their own ways, through ownership, observation, and depiction, they were connoisseurs of art and nature, this connoisseurship alluding to questions pertaining to the recognition of curious and exotic specimens, such as the horseshoe crab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Il Capitale Culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage is the property of Il Capitale Culturale Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Starting from the Tianping Mountain theme painting in Suzhou in the Ming Dynasty, we explore how did the painters and literati in this period shape the image of the Tianping Mountain through their works, thereby reflecting their understanding on many landscapes on the Tianping Mountain. By exploring a series of paintings and poems, we try to analyze the characteristics and cultural connotation of landscape paintings of the Tianping Mountain in the Ming Dynasty, which is conducive to improving position of the Tianping Mountain natural and humanistic landscape in Suzhou. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of the analyses was the painting Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian from the Collection of National Musuem in Warsaw. Cecco del Caravaggio (active c. 1610 – mid-1620s), now known as Francesco Buoneri, is one of several artists who painted in the style of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Giulio Mancini in Considerazioni sulla Pittura, mentions a 'Francesco detto Cecco del Caravaggio' as one of the great master's more noteworthy followers. During analyzing the painting (the analytical light, IR, X-ray, UV, cross-sections, SEM-EDS, XRF, GC-MS, FTIR), it turned out that the artist made corrections to the composition, including the most important, changing theme of the painting. X-ray images show that under the figure of the saint there is an image of Christ at the column. Examinations show that the pigments used by the Cecco were typical 17th century earth-based pigments and similar to Caravaggio palette. A very interesting part about the palette of the Caravaggisti is the use of white: they used calcium carbonate or chalk as an extender to lead white. The research on Cecco del Caravaggio painting technique was conducted as part of an exploratory project: Technique and technology of caravaggisti paintings based on polish museum collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interweaving of words and images is a fruitful key to understanding the history of culture and to reconnecting the links between tradition and contemporaneity; more particularly, the ékphrasis (the description of the images) played an important role in the antiquity and at the present proves to be a crucial element in the study of the relationship between literature and visual culture. Through re-reading sections about paintings with musical subject in literature by E.T.E. Hoffmann (Santa Cecilia all'organo by Carlo Dolci), Joris-Karl Huysmans (Salomé dansant devant Hérode and L'apparition by Gustave Moreau), Gabriele D'Annunzio (Herod's Banquet by Filippo Lippi and Il concerto interrotto by Titian), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Venus with an Organist and Cupid by Titian), this essay proposes to investigate on the one hand, the function of ékphrasis in the modern novel, and on the other the possibility of using it as a subsidiary means in the iconographical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The subject of this article is the figure of Friedrich Julius Kleinmichel, a genre painter, illustrator of books and magazines from the village of Rodzone near Lubawa. Research method: available literature, 19th century newspapers and books with illustrations as well as catalogues from exhibitions and auctions of his paintings were reviewed to present the silhouette and work of Friedrich Julius Kleinmichel. Results/conclusions: The subject of paintings and illustrations for books and newspapers of Friedrich Julius Kleinmichel mainly concerned children's world. He worked mainly with writers and poets of children's literature such as Victor Blüthgen, Helen Binder, Emma Biller, Julius Lohmeyer, Johannes Trojan, Franz Dittmar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ars Adriatica is the property of Sveuciliste u Zadru (University of Zadar) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Rembrandt has been characterized as "the master of the passions of the soul". His painting production has always elicited the viewers' strong emotional responses. Τhese responses raise the question regarding why Rembrandt's work has been singled out as the quintessential example of the expression of emotions both during the 17th century, as well as in recent times. I will try to approach the issue through two different yet interconnected routes. First, I will explore the tools and terms through which the question of the expression of emotions in Rembrandt's oeuvre can be approached. Ancient rhetorical topoi, as well as ideas stemming from Dutch theater writers, drama and art theorists, scholars and art connoisseurs on the rendition of the emotions provide useful points of view. Secondly, I will approach the question by addressing certain stylistic and compositional solutions that Rembrandt suggested, which can be tied to current notions about lifelikeness and the beholder's empathy. Foremost among Rembrandt's aesthetic choices was his handling of light and of paint which accounts for a great deal of unfavorable criticism to his work during the 17th century. I would like to suggest that this handling of light and paint serves as Rembrandt's most important emotive vehicle and furthermore that it introduces us to the idea of wonder and the concept of the sublime in terms of which his depiction of emotions may be understood. Accordingly, I will try to establish an intellectual network in the 17th-century Netherlands for the sublime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of continuous narration—the representation of multiple narrative moments in a single visual field—in Roman painting of the first centuries BCE and CE attests to the ways time and space could be creatively connected in ancient art. This pictorial device animates painting in its interplay with the viewer, at once multiplying points of view and mediating between internal and external images. It thus models Roman attitudes toward not only the representation of the world but also the interpretation of pictures. In so doing, it demonstrates a significant form of material agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claude Lorrain was one of the first painters in the art history to break away from literary (religious, mythological) themes and to veer in the direction of more open interpretations of meaning. Works by Claude Lorrain that have positively identifiable themes are scenes of a narrative nature, yet the titles that were applied to such paintings -- for instance Landscape with Acis and Galatea, Seaport with Ulysses Returning Chryseis to Her Father -- would have been inconceivable to members of earlier generations. In the paintings of Claude, the viewer could celebrate not only the embodiment of beauty but also the art of beauty. Instead of being treated as a parable, subject to constant reinterpretation in accordance with the concept of the idea, the image could now be seen simply as a visualisation of the ideal of the individual. It is the landscape that takes precedence over the events themselves. Nature is not subjugated to expressing or suppressing human passions; nature is never anything but beautiful and indifferent, a backdrop to human action. In my study, I examine in detail a little known 1667 painting by Claude, which is in a private collection and the iconographic status of which is uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about audio description of works of art. The term audio description is defined at the beginning of the text, next there is a description of how AD began in the United States and in Poland. After that, the types of AD in works of art and the rules of its creating are presented. The following paragraphs are about translating paintings through the senses, that is the hearing (ekphrasis, soundpainting), the touch (miniature models, typhlographies, touch tours) the smell or the taste (specially prepared fragrance or taste composition). The article finishes with the author looking at AD in plastic arts in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and the Museum of the City of Łódź. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]