China and the West

For the first time, an edited volume presents a major survey dedicated to Chinese reverse glass painting, tracing its history, its local and global diffusion, and its artistic and technical characteristics. Manufactured for export to Europe as well as for local consumption within China, the fragile artworks constitute a paramount part of Chinese visual culture and attest to the intensive cultural and artistic exchange between China and the West

Organic growth and form in abstract painting

This doctorate explores 'Organic Growth and Form in Abstract Painting', as the focus of my studio-based research, and which has resulted in two significant series of paintings, Organica and Streaming. The accompanying exegesis addresses experiences that are realized within the studio practice, and complements the two series of paintings. In the exegesis I describe the innovative and distinctive painting processes I have developed, and explain my motivation for working this way. I cite the writing of the philosopher of science, Henri Bortoft, in particular his description of 'active' seeing, which I suggest can be understood as a kind of modeling of my processes of making the Organica and Streaming paintings. Key to my research has been an investigation into the work of the early Russian avant-garde artist, musician, theorist and teacher, Mikhail Matyushin, who promoted an 'organic' vision of painting during the early years of modernist experimentation, insisting that perception cannot be separated from the body's inherent connection with nature. I discuss how the artists in the Organic studio, led by Matyushin, tested their sensitivity to perceptual and sensory experience with controlled experiments. Philosophically, they considered their findings to be congenial with the latest scientific discoveries of their time. Although my paintings are constructed very differently from those of Matyushin, my approach to perception and interpretation in painting is in sympathy with his thinking. The constructive and perceptual approach I have taken to both series of paintings has been directly influenced by immersion in natural environments. My exegesis provides a detailed account of this working process: how I work with geometric templates for the coordination of colours, and my systematic approach to their application, leading to uncontrived 'organic' extensions in the detail. I discuss my interest in the implicit knowledge garnered through perception of colours and the connective fabric underlying surface appearances in nature. I argue that these observations are generative resources for painting, and emphasise the fact that our sensory and thinking bodies are also part of nature. - provided by Candidate

China and the West

For the first time, an edited volume presents a major survey dedicated to Chinese reverse glass painting, tracing its history, its local and global diffusion, and its artistic and technical characteristics. Manufactured for export to Europe as well as for local consumption within China, the fragile artworks constitute a paramount part of Chinese visual culture and attest to the intensive cultural and artistic exchange between China and the West

Early Sámi visual artists - Western fine art meets Sámi culture

Johan Turi (1854–1936), Nils Nilsson Skum (1872–1951) and John Savio (1902–1938) were among the first Sámi visual artists. The production of their art work occurred between the 1910s and the early 1950s. Sámi aesthetics had its basis in folklore, i.e., handicraft or duodji, which did not follow the principle of art for art’s sake but combined beauty and practicality. Art was part of community life. Not until the 1970s was the word daidda, which is Finnish in origin and which means “art”, adopted into the Sámi language. Turi and Skum became famous through their books. They drew and wrote in order to pass the traditional knowledge of their people on to succeeding generations. They also wanted to introduce Sámi life and culture to non-Sámi people. One typical feature of their work is that they depicted Sáminess in a realistic way and sought to strengthen and preserve the Sámi identity through their art. In Turi and Skum’s work, both the documentation of community life and their own personal expression were strongly present and equally important; for this reason their pictures and texts have both practical and aesthetic dimensions. They did not attend school and were self-taught artists. The third pioneer of Sámi visual arts was John Savio, who, unlike the other two, attended secondary school and studied visual arts both independently and under the guidance of a mentor. He expressively combined Western ways of depiction with Sámi subjects. My article examines what made these early Sámi artists change over from Sámi handicraft, duodji, to Western visual arts, how they used Western pictorial conventions in dealing with their Sámi subjects, and the significance of their art for Sámi identity and culture. They lived and worked under cross pressure: the first few decades of the 20th century were characterized by racial theories that denigrated Sámi people, and the period following World War II was marked by demands for modernization and assimilation. Therefore, I also discuss how the conflicts of the time influenced the art of these three early Sámi artists

The monotype as a distinctive form: A practice-led investigation into how the monotype can deliver affect

This practice-led research project investigates the monotype as a distinctive form, and one which has been hitherto somewhat under-regarded and given relatively little theoretical analysis or interpretive attention from the perspective of the studio practitioner. This research leads me to investigate distinctive formal, material and perceptual qualities of the monotype process, which are conducive to metaphoric associations appropriate to my themes of memory, space and time, through the generation of affect. Both the monotype and affect are realised in in-between spaces. The monotype emerges from exchanges that take place between iterations of drawings, painting and printing, and the images that result are influenced and transformed by these exchanges. Throughout the project I explore and analyse resonances between the qualities of the monotype and the characteristics of the concepts of phenomenology and affect. My research is informed by the writings of: Antonio Damasio and Siri Hustvedt on affect, phenomenology and memory; Brian Massumi on affect; Henri Lefebvre on space, time and rhythm; Tim Ingold on linear interconnectedness; John Berger on drawing and process; François Jullien on the Chinese tradition; the philosophy of Elizabeth Grosz, and Thomas Middlemost on the monotype in Australia. In creating several series of monotypes involving expressive and intuitive gestural imagery, and qualities of luminosity and rhythm resonant with my lived experience, I have been influenced by artists past and present. These include Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, John Constable, Paul Cezanne, Sidney Nolan, Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Ken Whisson, Elisabeth Cummings, and Chinese ink and brush painters. I reflect on the qualities of immersiveness, between-ness, tactility, spontaneity and the intuitive expression of personal experience, as qualities intrinsic to the monotype, and essential to my project’s aim for the delivery of affect. I further explore the relations of composition to pictorial space, of figure to ground, distinctive to the monotype. The accompanying exegesis charts the course of my discoveries with the affectively engaging monotype as I create expressions of my lived experiences through the themes of familial relations, our relations to place and to our natural environments, and to the life of the studio. While I began with a sense of these themes as leading my project, the monotype process became, in a sense, the true subject matter of my research. While I absorbed and filtered my own bodily experiences of the world, my engagement with the monotype process became a significantly transformative one, an exploration of multiple states though the various iterations of an image, and a process of imbuing images with metaphysical resonance

Line drawings for face portraits from photos using global and local structure based GANs

Despite significant effort and notable success of neural style transfer, it remains challenging for highly abstract styles, in particular line drawings. In this paper, we propose APDrawingGAN++, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for transforming face photos to artistic portrait drawings (APDrawings), which addresses substantial challenges including highly abstract style, different drawing techniques for different facial features, and high perceptual sensitivity to artifacts. To address these, we propose a composite GAN architecture that consists of local networks (to learn effective representations for specific facial features) and a global network (to capture the overall content). We provide a theoretical explanation for the necessity of this composite GAN structure by proving that any GAN with a single generator cannot generate artistic styles like APDrawings. We further introduce a classification-and-synthesis approach for lips and hair where different drawing styles are used by artists, which applies suitable styles for a given input. To capture the highly abstract art form inherent in APDrawings, we address two challenging operations — (1) coping with lines with small misalignments while penalizing large discrepancy and (2) generating more continuous lines — by introducing two novel loss terms: one is a novel distance transform loss with nonlinear mapping and the other is a novel line continuity loss, both of which improve the line quality. We also develop dedicated data augmentation and pre-training to further improve results. Extensive experiments, including a user study, show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively