Tag: art

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.

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

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!

A Pittsburgh Adventure | May 27 2024, 02:08

“How about joining me in Pittsburgh?” Nadya has a volleyball tournament for three days. “And let’s take the pets with us!” It turned out that the hotel Nadya had booked, entirely by chance, happened to be pet friendly. They don’t even charge extra.

Yuki and our cat are generally accustomed to traveling. Yuki has traveled with us to Boston, Quebec, Savannah, New York, while the cat has been to Canada and Liza took him on a long trail. Thus, the 4.5-hour journey passed smoothly and quietly.

However, it was still noticeable that a country dog had made it to the big city. All around was noise, headlights, pedestrian paths often with various ventilation holes from which loud warm air blew, probably stinking to Yuki’s sensitive nose. In the city, it’s really a challenge to find a patch of grass, and the few there are get locked up with gates in the evening. Nevertheless, I’ve also gotten somewhat used to big cities myself.

We’re heading back tomorrow. I’ve always wondered how dogs perceive such trips? On one hand, all animals are comfortable when everything is predictable with minimal surprises and worries. Humans are like that too, some of them. On the other hand, mustn’t the brain somehow be rewarded for new emotions and experiences, even if it’s a canine brain? After all, biologically curiosity should be rewarded, right? Overall, I hope this is also a little “vacation” for Yuki and the cat, or perhaps even a “debut.”

Interestingly, just as we arrived and checked in, which was quite late, we went for a walk with Yuki in Point State Park. Somewhere, something suddenly boomed once, and Yuki got scared. But he soon recovered, and right then, we found out we were very close to the place from where fireworks were launched. The booms then continued for about 30 minutes non-stop, and the whole sky was filled with fireworks. But Yuki, it seems, was like — oh, it’s just fireworks, I remember them, we went to Philadelphia for the Fourth of July. And he bravely watched with us, even with a bit of interest. Good boy. We thought it was some large-scale super fireworks in anticipation of Memorial Day (which is tomorrow), but it turned out that it was just after a baseball game where the Pittsburgh Pirates won against the Atlanta Braves (Pirates won), and the fireworks at the end celebrated a beautiful finale.