Anticipating Artistic Behavior: New Research Tools for Art Historians

The author applies David Galenson\u27s work on the life cycles of modern artists to the study of the paintings of old masters, from about the early fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. Both the potential use of technical examination of paintings and the role of drawings for preconceiving compositions are explored as means for interpreting artistic behavior among premodern artists. Using a study of illustrations in texts to establish a list of canonical painters and the relative dates in which they are believed to have contributed their most important paintings, the author then analyzes a series of old master painters\u27 working methods, demonstrating how their creative behavior corresponds to what their respective life cycles would suggest. Thus, the study of artists\u27 life cycles could anticipate the use of optical and other mechanical devices for the production of premodem paintings based on such studies

Gerald Donato: reinventing the game

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (VCUarts) Anderson Gallery, Richmond, Virginia, and at Staniar Gallery at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, in 2007.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/anderson_gallery/1003/thumbnail.jp

Sweet! Cartoons and contemporary painting

I am an artist, and I use cartoons. My work consists mainly of images that communicate to the viewer through recognizable forms. I also use text to help tell my stories. I often create visual elements that function in place of text or information. I use a third visual tool, a hybrid descendant of images and words: the cartoon. Cartoons, once situated at the margins of visual discourse, now have a place in the fine art world. There are comics and animated television shows created for adult audiences. There are gallery and museum shows of work influenced by cartoons, not to mention exhibitions of original comics from early in cartoon history. Antique dealers buy and sell animation cels. The high-low culture dichotomy is no longer dogma. In this essay I will examine how other contemporary artists use cartoons, and how their practices have influenced my own work. Many artists of the past century have invented their own pictorial languages, and incorporate elements of popular visual culture. Artists today continue to do this through the use of recognizable cartoon elements. Four artists who have been influencial for me – Gary Taxali, Jeff Soto, Gary Baseman, and Saul Steinberg – share this cartoon language. There are many themes in my work that would make appropriate topics for this thesis. I choose cartoons because they are the most relevent to contemporary visual culture. At first glance it may not seem that I create cartoons per se. But there are identifiable characteristics of cartooning that I find useful: the synthesis of words and imagery, the use of stylized line to create simple but idiosyncratic forms, and the recognizability of cartoons as an avenue for communication. In the course of researching material for this thesis, I was unable to find in-depth discussions of cartoons as they pertain to our understanding of language in general. It is agreed that contemporary artists use cartoons, and the history of cartoons and comics are widely discussed. But the hows and whys of this usage are not. I hope to explore aspects of that idea here. I have attempted to place the significance of my own work in a cultural context through the language of cartoons. Cartoons are a viable visual language, an effective tool of communication, and an important idiom in our culture. They are simple, yet very powerful. Their omnipresence in our culture speaks to their adaptability. Artists use cartoons because they say something. They are visually compelling, and they come packaged with certain messages. The language speaks

Drawing from motion capture : developing visual languages of animation

The work presented in this thesis aims to explore novel approaches of combining motion capture with drawing and 3D animation. As the art form of animation matures, possibilities of hybrid techniques become more feasible, and crosses between traditional and digital media provide new opportunities for artistic expression. 3D computer animation is used for its keyframing and rendering advancements, that result in complex pipelines where different areas of technical and artistic specialists contribute to the end result. Motion capture is mostly used for realistic animation, more often than not for live-action filmmaking, as a visual effect. Realistic animated films depend on retargeting techniques, designed to preserve actors performances with a high degree of accuracy. In this thesis, we investigate alternative production methods that do not depend on retargeting, and provide animators with greater options for experimentation and expressivity. As motion capture data is a great source for naturalistic movements, we aim to combine it with interactive methods such as digital sculpting and 3D drawing. As drawing is predominately used in preproduction, in both the case of realistic animation and visual effects, we embed it instead to alternative production methods, where artists can benefit from improvisation and expression, while emerging in a three-dimensional environment. Additionally, we apply these alternative methods for the visual development of animation, where they become relevant for the creation of specific visual languages that can be used to articulate concrete ideas for storytelling in animation

A Study in Using Sketching Techniques to Develop Cohesive Narrative Art

This is an arts-based research study on the effects of applying extensive and diverse sketching techniques to the development of a cohesive body of work, which reflects the significant and meaningful events of the artist-researcher’s life. The research techniques employed and studied consist of looking at historical exemplars, sketching, reflecting, critiquing, and revising. The results of the research were then reflected upon and applied to the field of art education in an attempt to discover the benefits for both teaching and learning in kindergarten through 12th grade curriculums

Differential operators on sketches via alpha contours

A vector sketch is a popular and natural geometry representation depicting a 2D shape. When viewed from afar, the disconnected vector strokes of a sketch and the empty space around them visually merge into positive space and negative space, respectively. Positive and negative spaces are the key elements in the composition of a sketch and define what we perceive as the shape. Nevertheless, the notion of positive or negative space is mathematically ambiguous: While the strokes unambiguously indicate the interior or boundary of a 2D shape, the empty space may or may not belong to the shape’s exterior. For standard discrete geometry representations, such as meshes or point clouds, some of the most robust pipelines rely on discretizations of differential operators, such as Laplace-Beltrami. Such discretizations are not available for vector sketches; defining them may enable numerous applications of classical methods on vector sketches. However, to do so, one needs to define the positive space of a vector sketch, or the sketch shape. Even though extracting this 2D sketch shape is mathematically ambiguous, we propose a robust algorithm, Alpha Contours, constructing its conservative estimate: a 2D shape containing all the input strokes, which lie in its interior or on its boundary, and aligning tightly to a sketch. This allows us to define popular differential operators on vector sketches, such as Laplacian and Steklov operators. We demonstrate that our construction enables robust tools for vector sketches, such as As-Rigid-As-Possible sketch deformation and functional maps between sketches, as well as solving partial differential equations on a vector sketch