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Discovering Tiffany Lamps: A Hidden Art Gem in Orlando | June 06 2024, 23:47

In Orlando, I didn’t really expect any art museums, as the city, to put it politely, has a different focus. However, the museum I visited was indeed a hidden gem. The Charles Morse Museum is largely dedicated to Tiffany lamps. Tiffany lamps refer to a style first created and made famous by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the elder son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, the renowned owner of the jewelry firm Tiffany & Co.

The idea to create lamps came unexpectedly. When making stained glass windows, there was a huge amount of unused material. Not wanting to waste it, Louis Comfort decided to try creating something new and useful, which led to the first example of these lamps.

He was the first to come up with joining small pieces of colored glass using a narrow copper foil strip and lead came, thus creating the first lampshade in this technique.

And now, the museum is full of these original lamps and stained glasses. Check out the photos!

The business of the creator began to decline shortly before World War I. In 1917, Tiffany retired, allowing some of his employees to continue selling the products and furnaces for glassmaking. After his death (1932), the popularity of his creations significantly decreased. For two decades, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s designs were forgotten. Over time, Tiffany lamps regained popularity, and his works began to be exhibited in various museums; collectors were in constant search for these rarities. Many craftsmen, due to such demand, attempted to replicate the famous lamps, but it was nearly impossible. Today, the creator’s works are highly valued worldwide as modern-style designer items.

There were also exhibits unrelated to the Tiffany lamp technique. I’ll add them too, it’s all very beautiful.

In short, Orlando is not just about theme parks. Although, of course, I did see a park too — Disney Hollywood Park, where I attended a Maroon 5 concert.

Navigating Flight Delays: The Impact of Lightning Strikes | June 06 2024, 23:22

The storm is delaying the flight. FAA rules are such: if there’s lightning within a certain radius, a 15-minute countdown begins. If no new lightning strikes occur before the time is up, the airport resumes operations, we announce boarding, and likely, the plane will depart swiftly. Ultimately, you can’t get far from the gate.

Understanding Pneumatophores: The Breathing Roots of Trees | June 06 2024, 21:58

These protrusions sticking out of the ground are the tree’s breathing organs. Pneumatophores. Normal trees breathe oxygen through the soil, but in very moist soil there is simply very little oxygen, and the trees reach upward with their roots. You might ask, why don’t they breathe with their above-ground parts as well? They do, but the pump in the tree’s capillaries works from bottom to top, and the roots need something to live on.

Photo by me, Orlando

Andrea Kowch | June 05 2024, 12:24

(ENG) This artist, Andrea Kowch, has long been on my list for this series, yet each time something delayed it. Her works, on my beauty scale, ascend into an extra dimension, for it’s insufficient to merely call them beautiful, yet their artistry is undeniable. Furthermore, it’s hard to tear one’s gaze away, isn’t it? The everyday triteness of village life is transformed into a scene from some magical realism novel. Undoubtedly, Kowch has a rich imagination and the artistic mastery to realize it. Her technique and detailed approach are impressive. And indeed, we’ve been short of surrealists for some time. For an artist, being a bit “cuckoo” is arguably beneficial to the profession, at least while stationed before the canvas.

Kowch’s painting style might well be described as a “dark fairy tale,” as both elements pervade her canvases; dark, somber, almost gothic moods interspersed with fairy tale and narrative components.

The models for all of Kowch’s paintings are her friends. It seems some friends have become professional models, which is why faces often recur, even within the same piece. But this only adds to the mystery and allure.

A reminder that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes” section, you can find all 76 (unlike Facebook, which forgets about nearly half).

(/ENG)

Jeffrey Larson | June 03 2024, 03:21

Today, I suggest we get acquainted with another inspiring artist—American painter Jeffrey Larson. Sheer perfection! He has a large series of works featuring the sun, a girl, and laundry being hung. There’s a large series of still lifes. And portraits. And all of this is at the highest level.

I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes section, you can find all 75 (as of now) posts (unlike Facebook, which forgets (ignores) almost half of them).

Duane Keiser | June 01 2024, 17:12

Duane Keiser is a contemporary American musician and artist, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Duane created the “painting a day” trend. Every day he paints one postcard-sized painting and posts them on his website, where collectors can bid. Bidding starts at $100 and varies up to $1500.

“When I started painting in 2004, I did one painting a day for a year and a half. I wanted to create a ritual for myself—to finish a painting in one day without any excuses.”

It’s a great principle, by the way, applicable in any field. The second great principle is to share knowledge with others (which is why I started this blog). You can’t follow it unless you love what you do, and once you start following it, you can’t help but develop at the maximum possible pace. In the case of “a masterpiece every day,” you raise the bar for yourself so much that it’s just embarrassing to post something worse than what you posted before. And so it doesn’t turn out worse. Partly because so many hours of practice contribute to quality on their own. It’s partly the same when you regularly write articles for a blog—the “bar” rises, and so do the standards you set for yourself. But something else kicks in: you simply can’t leave things unfinished. If you need to talk about X, you will dig into everything around X to ensure there are no gaps in your understanding. This helped me a lot to master topics well.

I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes section, you can find all 73 (as of now) posts (unlike Facebook, which forgets (ignores) almost half of them).

Thomas Wells Schaller | May 31 2024, 22:27

American architect and watercolor artist Thomas Wells Schaller. Magical works. Watercolor masters never cease to amaze me!

I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes section, you can find all 73 (as of now) posts (unlike Facebook, which forgets (ignores) almost half of them).

Shōgun | May 31 2024, 12:30

I finished watching the series “Shōgun.” Quite good. Now I’m googling, and here and there a phrase pops up that “the series is based on real events.” Reading Wikipedia. It turns out that the author James Clavell was inspired by a line from a book he was reading to his daughter: “In the year 1600, an Englishman went to Japan and became a samurai.” James took that line and expanded it into a novel of 2300 pages. Later it was slightly condensed.

“A samurai without a sword is like a samurai with a sword. Only without the sword.” (Yamamoto Musashi)

As for the challenges – after watching for 10 hours, in the end, I can only recall the name of the Englishman John, and just one of the central feudal lords – Toranaga… and Lady Mariko. For the rest, I have to search online.

I highly recommend it, it’s very beautiful and enlightening about cultural differences. Hard to say how historically accurate it is, but at least it’s beautiful.

Digital Sleuthing: Extracting Artist Names from a Book Using Technology | May 31 2024, 01:50

How convenient it has become to work with books nowadays. On Saturday, Alla Prima II by artist Richard Schmid will arrive for me. But even before the purchase, I couldn’t resist and found a 500MB PDF version of the book online, and have already read 50 pages. And then I thought, what if I wanted to extract all the mentioned artists in the book, could I do it?

It turned out to be quite simple.

1) Split the PDF into individual pages using pdfseparate . This resulted in 332 PDFs totaling 472 MB. It takes a few minutes.

2) Convert the individual PDFs to JPG using pdftoppm -jpeg . This resulted in 332 JPGs. It takes a few minutes.

3) Recognize the text using tesseract . This process takes about 10 minutes.

4) Pass each page’s text to the local llama3, and request it to extract the names of artists from the text of each of the 332 pages (i.e., 332 requests). On my Mac, this took 12 minutes. In the end, I got 953 lines.

Llama3 is a bit slow, but overall it does reasonably well. It generates a lot of “noise” also like “Based on the provided text, here are the extracted names of painters” or “I’m happy to help!”. The output text after processing 332 pages is small, only 953 lines. We sort it, remove duplicates (resulted in 556). We remove all more than three words and fewer than two words through cat names.txt | awk ‘NF>=2 && NF<=4’. Ended up with 139 lines. Among them, there is still some noise, for example, names like “Cobalt Blue”, “What an interesting text!” and “Sherlock Holmes” were included as artist names. To clean them up, we use openai, which is smarter. We ask it to keep only artists and remove everything else. We got the list.

Alfred Sisley, Alphonse Mucha, Anders Zorn, Andrew Loomis, Anton Sterba, Antonio Mancini, Arthur Rackham, Berthe Morisot, Bill Mosby, Cecilia Beaux, Charles Hunter, Claude Monet, Dan Gerhartz, Dean Mitchell, Diego Velazquez, Donald Llanuza, Edmund Tarbell, Edouard Manet, Edouard Vuillard, Edward Atkinson Hornel, Eliot Goldfinger, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Frank Duveneck, Frank Vincent DuMond, Franz Hals, Frederic Remington, Gene Byrnes, George Bridgman, Georges Seurat, Gilbert Stuart, Giovanni Boldini, Grace Arnold, Hans Holbein, Harry Anderson, Heinrich Kley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Howard Pyle, Ilya Repin, Isaac Levitan, J. W. Waterhouse, J. C. Leyendecker, J.H. Vanderpoel, James M. Dunlop, Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, Jeremy Lipking, Jessie H. Vanderpoel, Joaquin Sorolla, John Gannam, John Singer Sargent, John Singleton Copley, John Twachtman, Katie Swatland, Marcus Thomas, Mary Cassatt, Michael Wilcox, N. C. Wyeth, Nancy Guzik, Nicolai Fechin, Norman Rockwell, Paolo Michetti, Paul Mullally, Peter Paul Rubens, Philip Andreevich Maliavin, Ralph Mayer, Richard Schmid, Robert Henri, Rose Frantzen, Scott Burdick, Shannon Two, Stephen Rogers Peck, Susan Lyon, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Valentin Serov, Vincent Van Gogh, Wayman Adams, William H. Mosby, William Harnett, William Merritt Chase

5) Now, we send this list back to openai and ask if there are any non-artists among these names. It turned out that all are fine, all of them are artists.

6) For reliability, we also ask openai if there are names in this “clean” list that were not in the original (“dirty”) list, to check if openai invented any artist names when asked to extract from the “dirty” list. Great, it did not invent any.

Voilà! In just over half an hour, I have a list of artists mentioned in the book.

7) We ask openai to categorize the list and provide a brief description

RESULT

Impressionists and Post-Impressionists

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* Alfred Sisley – French impressionist, known for his landscapes.

* Claude Monet – Founder of Impressionism, famous for his water lilies and series of landscapes.

* Berthe Morisot – French impressionist, known for her portraits and scenes from everyday life.

* Edouard Manet – French artist, a precursor to Impressionism, known for his portraits and scenes from Parisian life.

* Georges Seurat – French post-impressionist, founder of pointillism.

* Vincent Van Gogh – Dutch post-impressionist, known for his vivid and emotional paintings.

Realism and Academic Painting

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* Edouard Vuillard – French artist, member of the Nabis group, known for his interiors and figurative compositions.

* Anders Zorn – Swedish artist, known for his portraits and genre scenes.

* Cecilia Beaux – American portrait artist who worked in the style of academic realism.

* Diego Velazquez – Spanish Baroque artist, known for his portraits and historical scenes.

* Edmund Tarbell – American artist, known for his impressionistic portraits and genre scenes.

* Franz Hals – Dutch portrait artist, one of the greatest artists of Holland’s Golden Age.

* Frederic Remington – American artist and sculptor, specialized in scenes of the Wild West.

* Gilbert Stuart – American artist, known for his portraits, including the depiction of George Washington.

* Hans Holbein – German Renaissance artist, known for his portraits and religious paintings.

* Ilya Repin – Russian realistic artist, known for his historical and genre paintings.

* Isaac Levitan – Russian landscape artist, master of lyrical landscape.

* John Singer Sargent – American portrait artist, known for his exquisite and elegant portraits.

* Thomas Eakins – American realist, known for his portraits and genre scenes.

* Valentin Serov – Russian portrait artist, one of the leading representatives of the Russian realistic school.

Art Nouveau and Illustration

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* Alphonse Mucha – Czech artist, a key figure in Art Nouveau, known for his decorative posters.

* Arthur Rackham – British illustrator, known for his magical and fantastical images.

* Howard Pyle – American illustrator, founder of the Brandywine School of illustration.

* J. C. Leyendecker – American illustrator, known for his advertising and magazine covers.

* N. C. Wyeth – American illustrator and artist, known for his works for classic adventure novels.

* Norman Rockwell – American artist and illustrator, known for his idealized images of American life.

* Frank Vincent DuMond – American artist and educator, known for his landscapes and genre scenes.

Portraitists and Genre Artists

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* Cecilia Beaux – American portrait artist who worked in the style of academic realism.

* Diego Velazquez – Spanish Baroque artist, known for his portraits and historical scenes.

* Franz Hals – Dutch portrait artist, one of the greatest artists of Holland’s Golden Age.

* John Singer Sargent – American portrait artist, known for his exquisite and elegant portraits.

* Thomas Eakins – American realist, known for his portraits and genre scenes.

* Valentin Serov – Russian portrait artist, one of the leading representatives of the Russian realistic school.

* Jean Dagnan-Bouveret – French academic artist, known for his genre scenes and portraits.

* Joaquin Sorolla – Spanish artist, master of light, known for his portraits and beach scenes.

* John Singleton Copley – American colonial artist, known for his portraits.

Masters of Landscape

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* Alfred Sisley – French impressionist, known for his landscapes.

* Claude Monet – Founder of Impressionism, famous for his water lilies and series of landscapes.

* Isaac Levitan – Russian landscape artist, master of lyrical landscape.

* John Twachtman – American impressionist, known for his lyrical landscapes.

* Dan Gerhartz – Contemporary American artist, known for his atmospheric landscapes and figurative works.

* Dean Mitchell – American artist, known for his watercolor landscapes and urban scenes.

Contemporary Artists

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* Dan Gerhartz – Contemporary American artist, known for his atmospheric landscapes and figurative works.

* Dean Mitchell – American artist, known for his watercolor landscapes and urban scenes.

* Jeremy Lipking – Contemporary American artist, known for his portraits and figurative works.

* Nancy Guzik – Contemporary American artist, known for her lyrical and romantic figurative works.

* Richard Schmid – American artist and educator, master of figurative painting.

Other Famous Artists

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* J. W. Waterhouse – British artist, known for his paintings on mythological and literary themes.

* Paolo Michetti – Italian artist, worked in the genres of realism and symbolism.

* Peter Paul Rubens – Flemish Baroque artist, known for his allegorical and mythological paintings.

* Gilbert Stuart – American artist, known for his portraits, including the depiction of George Washington.

* Giovanni Boldini – Italian portrait artist, known for his elegant and dynamic portraits.

* Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – French post-impressionist, known for his posters and scenes of Parisian life.

* Howard Pyle – American illustrator, founder of the Brandywine School of illustration.

* Franz Hals – Dutch portrait artist, one of the greatest artists of Holland’s Golden Age.

* Frederic Remington – American artist and sculptor, specialized in scenes of the Wild West.

* Hans Holbein – German Renaissance artist, known for his portraits and religious paintings.

It’s amazing what you can now do with a computer and information!