The construction of likeness in some contemporary high portrait painting

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Arts. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Fine Arts. Johannesburg 1996Likeness is a central issue to the tradition of portrait painting. This dissertation examines the notion of likeness in some contemporary high portrait painting. Likeness is viewed as constructed socially through the complex relations between artist, sitter and viewer. Faced with the problematic notions of realism and naturalism and their philosophical ramifications, the dissertation confronts the question of What in our world can be regarded as natural or given, and what is constructed or acquired. The discussion, framed by the debate set up between Nelson Goodman and E.H. Gombrich, leads to the conclusion that the 'natural' and the 'real' are not neutral, they are highly constructed. The dIfferences between various conventions; various ways of representing others, are extrapolated from the debate, and once acknowledged. the final position taken is a less linear conventionalist stance. The constructed nature of likeness is tested against the portraits by American artist, Andy Warhol and British artist. Lucian Freud, contemporary painters working in direct antithesis to one another. The aim is to show that both of their portrait likenesses. whether private or public, painterly Or mechanical, are embedded within socially constructed conventions. Recognition of 'the conventions can guide the viewer in deconstructing the work and locating the meaning. I discuss my own work in relation to the contents of this dissertation

Evidence generation and reproducibility in cell and gene therapy research: A call to action.

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B0 insensitive multiple-quantum resolved sodium imaging using a phase-rotation scheme

Triple-quantum filtering has been suggested as a mechanism to differentiate signals from different physiological compartments. However, the filtering method is sensitive to static field inhomogeneities because different coherence pathways may interfere destructively. Previously suggested methods employed additional phase-cycles to separately acquire pathways. Whilst this removes the signal dropouts, it reduces the signal-to-noise per unit time. In this work we suggest the use of a phase-rotation scheme to simultaneously acquire all coherence pathways and then separate them via Fourier transform. Hence the method yields single-, double- and triple-quantum filtered images. The phase-rotation requires a minimum of 36 instead of six cycling steps. However, destructive interference is circumvented whilst maintaining full signal-to-noise efficiency for all coherences