ReconFigure paintings

ReconFigure Paintings is a series of work that uses reproductions of historical paintings as a base for geometric abstracted marks, which block out the figure in the original compositions. The research explores contemporary painting as a parasitic practice on it's own lineage. The work was developed during a residency Standpoint Gallery, London during October 2011, which led to a solo exhibition presentation. Bracey spent much of his time in the National Gallery researching specific paintings, such as Delarouche's Execution of Lady Grey and Leonardo Da Vinci's Virgin on the Rocks, resulting in a triptych of new paintings in response to the Da Vinci and 2 new paintings in relation to the Delarouche. ReconFigure Paintings builds on research disseminated previously in the artefacts Transitory Paintings, Self Portrait, an artist's book of over 100 reflected self portraits in artworks and palette Parasite, where artworks were installed on the outside of gallery (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Manchester Art gallery; The Collection, Lincoln and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, curated by Anneka French) walls. As part of the residency at Standpoint Gallery, Bracey delivered an in-conversation public talk with Peter Ashton-Jones editor of Turps Banana. The work has been further shown in Manchester Contemporary with Castlefield Gallery (2011), Art Gwanju:12, South Korea (2012), A Blind Python with Jewelled Eyes, Greestone Gallery, Lincoln (2012), A Private Affair, Harris Museum and Gallery, Preston (2012) Andrew Bracey, Jon Barraclough, Emma Stibbon and Julie McCalden, South Wales and Severn Office of the Canal & River Trust, Gloucester (2012), Possession, Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2013), Mondegreen Ekphrasis, The Collection, Lincoln (2013), The Ends of Art, Beton7, Athens (2013)

PRISMS: remote high resolution in situ multispectral imaging of wall paintings

The non-invasive monitoring and examination of wall paintings in grotto sites, tombs and buildings is particularly important since these paintings are often extremely vulnerable. Traditionally, inspection of wall paintings at high resolution (i.e. sub-millimetre resolution) requires either scaffolding or some heavy and cumbersome mechanical structure to lift a person or camera to the upper parts of a wall or ceiling. We have developed a proto-type portable remote imaging multi-spectral camera that operates at ground level for in situ high-resolution colour and spectral imaging of wall paintings. We present here the latest developments for the instrument and examples of how the instrument can be used for diagnosis of wall paintings

Pandora: Description of a Painting Database for Art Movement Recognition with Baselines and Perspectives

To facilitate computer analysis of visual art, in the form of paintings, we introduce Pandora (Paintings Dataset for Recognizing the Art movement) database, a collection of digitized paintings labelled with respect to the artistic movement. Noting that the set of databases available as benchmarks for evaluation is highly reduced and most existing ones are limited in variability and number of images, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The database consists of more than 7700 images from 12 art movements. Each genre is illustrated by a number of images varying from 250 to nearly 1000. We investigate how local and global features and classification systems are able to recognize the art movement. Our experimental results suggest that accurate recognition is achievable by a combination of various categories.To facilitate computer analysis of visual art, in the form of paintings, we introduce Pandora (Paintings Dataset for Recognizing the Art movement) database, a collection of digitized paintings labelled with respect to the artistic movement. Noting that the set of databases available as benchmarks for evaluation is highly reduced and most existing ones are limited in variability and number of images, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The database consists of more than 7700 images from 12 art movements. Each genre is illustrated by a number of images varying from 250 to nearly 1000. We investigate how local and global features and classification systems are able to recognize the art movement. Our experimental results suggest that accurate recognition is achievable by a combination of various categories.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, 6 table

Louvre Museum - Paintings

The Louvre Museum is the largest of the world's art museums by its exhibition surface. These represent the Western art of the Middle Ages in 1848, those of the ancient civilizations that preceded and influenced it (Oriental, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman), and the arts of early Christians and Islam. At the origin of the Louvre existed a castle, built by King Philip Augustus in 1190, and occupying the southwest quarter of the current Cour Carrée. In 1594, Henri IV decided to unite the palace of the Louvre with the palace of the Tuileries built by Catherine de Medicis. The Cour Carrée was built by the architects Lemercier and then Le Vau, under the reign of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. The Department of Paintings currently has about 7,500 paintings (of which 3,400 are exposed), covering a period that goes from the Middle Ages to 1848 (date of the beginning of the Second Republic). By including the deposits, the collection is, with 12,660 works, the largest collection of ancient paintings in the world. With rare exceptions, the works after 1848 were transferred to the Musée d'Orsay when it was created in 1986. CONTENTS: Louvre Museum - Variety of exhibited works - The Royal Palace - The collections - - Eastern antiquities - - Arts of Islam - - Egyptian Antiquities - - Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities - - Paintings - - - French school - - - Northern Schools (Flanders, Netherlands, Germany) - - - Italian School - - - Other schools Painting - Definitions - Painting genres - - The landscape - - Still life Paintings - FRANCOIS BOUCHER - - Vulcan presenting arms to Venus for Aeneas - RAPHAEL - - Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione - RUBENS - - Helena Fourment with children - LOUIS DAVID - - Madame Récamier - REMBRANDT - - Portrait of Heindrickje Stoffels - VELAZQUEZ - - Portrait of the Infanta Margarita - SIMONE MEMMI - - Jesus Christ walking on Calvary - JAN STEEN - - The Bad Company - HANS HOLBEIN - - Erasmus - CORREGGIO - - Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine - LANCRET - - Conversation - JAN VAN DER MEER (VERMEER) - - The Lacemaker - VAN DYCK - - Charles I at the Hunt - FRANÇOIS CLOUET - - Elisabeth of Austria (1554-1592), Wife of Charles IX and Queen of France (1570 - 1574) - DELACROIX - - The Barque of Dante - EL GRECO - - Saint Louis, King of France, and a page - REMBRANDT - - Pilgrims at Emmaus (The Supper at Emmaus) - GERARD DAVID - - Marriage at Cana - RAPHAEL - - Portrait of Dona Isabel de Requesens, Vice-Queen of Naples - RUBENS - - La Kermesse (The Village Fête, or Noce de village) - FRANS HALS - - The Gypsy Girl - DECAMPS - - The Sonneurs - HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER - - Anne of Cleves - P. PRUD’HON - - Psyche transported to Heaven - PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE - - Portrait of Richelieu - LANCRET - - The Autumn - L. DAVID - - Madame Seriziat - COROT - - Recollection of Mortefontaine - LEONARDO DA VINCI - - La belle ferronnière - CORREGGIO - - Venus and Cupid with a Satyr - WATTEAU - - Pilgrimage to Cythera (The Embarkation for Cythera) - NICOLAS POUSSIN - - The Inspiration of the Poet - PRUD’HON - - The Empress Josephine (1763-1814) - FRAGONARD - - The Bathers - H. RIGAUD - - Louis XIV (1638–1715) - TERBURG - - The Concert - LEOPOLD ROBERT - - The Pilgrimage to the Madonna of the Arch - LARGILLIERE - - Family Portrait - MANTEGNA - - Parnassus - MEMLING - - The Virgin and Child between St James and St Dominic - FRAGONARD - - The Music Lesson - JEAN VAN EYCK - - The Virgin of chancellor Rolin - PAOLO VERONESE - - Susannah and the Elders - FRANÇOIS BOUCHER - - Diana leaving her bath - GÉRICAULT - - The Raft of the Medusa - MURILLO - - Assumption of the Virgin - CLAUDE GELLEE (LORRAIN) - - Ulysses returning Chryseis to her father (Marine, setting sun) - INGRES - - Madame Riviere - E. MURILLO - - The Young Beggar - GREUZE - - The Broken Pitcher - PIETER DE HOOCH - - Card players in an opulent interior - POUSSIN - - Et in Arcadia ego - QUENTIN MATSYS - - The moneylender and his wife - ANDREA SOLARIO - - Madonna with the Green Cushion - TITIEN - - Woman with a Mirror - DAVID TENIERS (the Younger) - - The Works of Mercy - LEONARDO DA VINCI - - Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) - Armand Dayo

'The Paintings Within'

This is one of several contributory essays in the volume: 'Nicholas Lanier, 1588–1666. A Portrait Revealed'. It examines the two paintings that are internal to the portrait and suggests reasons for their inclusion and also proposes that they require ways of seeing which are unfamiliar to viewers today

Learning an Artist's Style: Just What Does a Pigeon See in a Picasso?

Judgments of style in art, music, and literature are commonplace, although the mechanisms providing for this structural sensitivity are not well understood. Watanabe, Sakamoto, and Wakita (1995) showed that pigeons trained to discriminate colour slides of paintings of Picasso from those of Monet could generalise this discrimination not only to new paintings of Picasso and Monet, but also to paintings of other cubist and impressionist painters. These results suggest that the bases for such judgments of artistic style may be simpler than normally thought. This tacit sensitivity to artistic style is explored in terms of a simple PCA network model applied to pixel-maps of the paintings. The eigenvectors obtained from the singular value decomposition of sets of these pixel-maps provide for descriptions of the stimuli in terms of visual “macro-features”. These macro-features provide a simple basis not only for recognising previously-experienced paintings, but for the successful discrimination of novel paintings into various style categories. A summary of simulations of the performance of Watanabe et al.’s pigeons using precisely the same stimuli and tasks is provided. The results suggest that the eigen-decomposition is a necessary first-step, and that the bases for judgments of style may indeed be quite simple

PRISMS: a portable multispectral imaging system for remote in situ examination of wall paintings

We present a proto-type portable remote multispectral imaging system, PRISMS (Portable Remote Imaging System for Multispectral Scanning), that is light-weight, flexible and without any cumbersome mechanical structure for in situ high resolution colour and spectral imaging of large and inaccessible paintings such as wall paintings. This is the first instrument to be able to image paintings at inaccessible heights in situ from ground level to produce not only high resolution colour images but also multispectral images

SIRIS: a high resolution scanning infrared camera for examining paintings

The new SIRIS (Scanning InfraRed Imaging System) camera developed at the National Gallery in London allows highresolution images of paintings to be made in the near infrared region (900–1700 nm). Images of 5000 × 5000 pixels are made by moving a 320 × 256 pixel InGaAs array across the focal plane of the camera using two orthogonal translation stages. The great advantages of this camera over scanning infrared devices are its relative portability and that image acquisition is comparatively rapid – a full 5000 × 5000 pixel image can be made in around 20 minutes. The paper describes the development of the mechanical, optical and electronic components of the camera, including the design of a new lens. The software routines used to control image capture and to assemble the individual 320 × 256 pixel frames into a seamless mosaic image are also mentioned. The optics of the SIRIS camera have been designed so that the camera can operate at a range of resolutions; from around 2.5 pixels per millimetre on large paintings of up to 2000 × 2000 mm to 10 pixels per millimetre on smaller paintings or details of paintings measuring 500 × 500 mm. The camera is primarily designed to examine underdrawings in paintings; preliminary results from test targets and paintings are presented and the quality of the images compared with those from other cameras currently used in this field