Tag: books

Cats in Art | July 04 2024, 06:45

I noticed in the museum that earlier artists for some reason had trouble with drawing cats. There were constant blunders with the anatomy. With dogs, things were more or less okay, swans and other game they painted very accurately (well, because you can spread it out on the table for a whole day), but a cat, obviously, won’t stay still on a table for long, and it seems they drew them “from imagination.” And their imagination, it seems, was based on medieval depictions of cats, where there was complete chaos — cats were portrayed almost with human faces, with eyebrows and expressions.

At the same time, there were some really good examples from the 19th century — for instance, google the cats by Henriëtte Ronner-Knip.

Boselli Felice, Nature Morte avec chat, chien, et deux garçonnets

George Catlin, Le Chat d’Ostende (1868)

Abraham Mignon, The Overturned Bouquet (1660–79)

Manhattan’s Historical Grid Design and Urban Expansion | June 26 2024, 15:42

I’m reading about the general plan of Manhattan. The history of it is quite fascinating. When Europeans first settled in Manhattan, they built houses haphazardly. Back then, it was the Dutch who called the place “New Amsterdam.” After gaining independence, the USA saw a massive influx of migrants, and there was a pressing need to expand the city rapidly. Ultimately, in 1806, the authorities formed a commission of three people (Morris, Rutherfurd, De Witt) and gave them four years to devise a city plan. It was decided beforehand that any plan they came up with would be final. This commission did literally nothing for three out of the four years. Then, they started to make a move, meeting a few months before the deadline for key decisions. And they came up with a grid (see picture). In English, this is called a gridiron. They nowhere explained why they specifically chose a grid design. Probably because the deadline was just a few months away.

It’s interesting how the plan was then implemented. To transpose the grid onto the ground, nearly 1600 markers were installed — primarily square marble “monuments” with street numbers, located at every intersection. Where rocks prevented the use of marble markers, the rocks were blasted away, iron bolts were inserted, and encased in molten lead. In total, they set up 1549 marble markers and 98 iron bolts to delineate the grid pattern. Landowners who disagreed with the city cutting through their fields would dig everything up.

The famous Central Park, as it turned out, came about 70 years later, in 1876. On the map, you see The Parade—located further to the south—but the idea was originally to not build on this site, using it as an open space designated for military drills and as a rally point in case the city was invaded. At that time, they thought this Grand Parade could become the city’s “central park,” but over time the area gradually reduced, until what now remains is the current Madison Square Park. Just like that, it shrank from 97 hectares to 2.8 hectares. Optimized. At least Central Park eventually came into existence (341 hectares).

Broadway merged several streets that historically went against the grid (Bloomingdale and others).

Ivan Pili | June 15 2024, 13:12

An intriguing contemporary artist from Italy is Ivan Pili (born in 1976), who excels in hyperrealism. Personally, I am not a big fan of hyperrealism, particularly when it fails to offer anything novel beyond traditional photography (For instance, William Harnett in the 19th century did something alike, but, as they say, feel the difference. I need to write about him tomorrow). Nevertheless, among the numerous hyperrealists, the works of Ivan Pili distinguish themselves with a unique ambiance. Thus, let’s warmly welcome him to our circle #artrauflikes. Under this hashtag, you might find the other 84 posts about fascinating artists, but since Facebook can be inefficient, you might also want to check beinginamerica.com where they are all collected in the Art Rauf Likes section.

Marilyn Monroe | June 12 2024, 15:11

A fine photograph (colorization mine). Marilyn Monroe gazes at her husband Arthur Miller, who has grown cold towards her and is harboring plans for divorce. Miller looks at Yves Montand, a star of European cinema at the time, whose friendship flattered him. Yves Montand looks at Marilyn Monroe, already smitten with her, on the brink of an affair. Yves Montand’s wife, Simone Signoret, watches her husband — she wouldn’t have been a great actress if she couldn’t show warmth convincingly and with dignity in this situation. All in all, it’s complicated.

Taken by Bruce Davidson (1960), during the filming of Let’s Make Love, Beverly Hills Hotel

Terry Miura | June 10 2024, 17:08

An intriguing artist, Terry Miura (born in 1964), originated from Japan and relocated to New York, where he pursued his education and furthered his artistic journey.

As I gaze upon his paintings, I am reminded of Richard Schmid’s assertion in his current book that nature contains no definitive lines. Thus, when translating visuals onto canvas, line-oriented thinking may prove counterproductive, even obstructive. It’s more useful to consider swathes of color. Another compelling concept he mentioned is prioritizing the observed over the known; should a conflict arise, depict what you see, for painting the known risks portraying an absence instead of presence—a fascinating notion indeed.

This perspective harks back to the ethos of earlier painters (and some of their modern counterparts): viewing objects more as people and items within a context than as visual constructs shaped by light necessitates painting based on known attributes—what other references could they rely on? Understandably, the more these early artists knew about their subjects, the more adept their renderings. Thus, depicting what was expected involved extensive study and memorization due to the sheer expanse of subjects. Naturally, this led to specialization: one might focus on animals, another on architecture, and a third on portraiture.

Even today, such artists (including many contemporaries) are often easily recognized as much for their thematic focus as for their stylistic and period distinctions.

I find this methodology compelling. It’s not novel, and Richard Schmid articulates it effectively. This becomes particularly evident when attempting to paint a modern car seen from a few meters away. It appears straightforward: four wheels, some curves. Yet, each car’s curves are unique, lacking clear rationale, and knowing the ‘anatomy’ of a Toyota RAV4 offers little aid in depicting, for example, a Chevrolet Corvette. Furthermore, proximity amplifies these curves’ perceptual distortions, potentially overwhelming the mind. It proves simpler to bypass sketching and commence with color patches and shapes, refining them subsequently.

Clearly, Terry Miura shares this perceptual framework. For him, there are no figures clad in red or white dresses; there are only patches. Compositionally effective and balanced patches are all that need to be accurately placed—and misplaced where not needed.

Note that related posts are consolidated under the hashtag #artrauflikes, and the “Art Rauf Likes” section on beinginamerica.com lists all 79 (unlike Facebook, which omits nearly half).

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

=================================

* 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

=============================

* 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

=================================

* 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

=============================

* 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

==============

* 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

====================

* 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

========================

* 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!

Chinese Names in Latin Script: how to pronounce | May 18 2024, 19:25

I’m currently reading Liu Cixin’s “The Dark Forest,” and I realized that I don’t understand how to pronounce Chinese names transcribed into Latin script, like Quang or Xin. I decided to educate myself on the topic and dug up some information. Below is a little guide for the similarly curious, who were perhaps too lazy to figure it out themselves.

For transcription into Russian, there is the Palladius system (Google it if you speak Russian). Generally, all of the information below is from there and from the Pinyin system (a romanization system for Chinese).

In general, most letters can be pronounced more or less (very roughly speaking) as in the English alphabet, except that the voiceless consonants p, t, k (for example) come with aspiration, but there are exceptions:

* q — pronounced like the Russian “ч” or the English “ch” (as in the word cheese) with a light aspiration. For example, Qiang is read as “Ч’ань”. Other names: Qing, Qin.

* x — resembles the soft Russian “ш/щ” or the English sh/sch. For example, Xia is pronounced as “Ща”. Other names: Xin, Xiu.

* r — something between r and zh/ж. In the Palladius system, ran is prescribed to be read as zhàn (жань), and rang as zhan (жан), and rao as zhao (жао). In Pinyin, it’s written that r is read as in red with a slight zh hue.

* z — like “ds” in the word “reads”.

* c — like the Russian “ts” as in “cats”.

Therefore, Xi Jinping is read as Си Цзиньпин. And Dèng Xiǎopíng is cyrillicized as Дэн Сяопин.

In Chinese names, the last name comes first, followed by the given name. For example, in “Li Wei,” “Li” is the surname, and “Wei” is the given name. Máo Zédōng, the name here is Zédōng, not Mao. Or Dèng Xiǎopíng, where the given name is Xiǎopíng. In the case of the author of “The Dark Forest,” Liu Cixin, the given name is Cixin.

However, I learned that addressing Chinese people by their full name is impolite and even rude. According to Chinese etiquette (in China), it is customary to address by last name, adding a title of social status/position (engineer, doctor, professor, academic, ambassador, teacher, master, foreman, director, etc.) or a general salutation (Mr., Comrade, Ms.). For example, Mr. Wu (in Chinese: Wu xiansheng), Ms. Zhang (in Chinese: Zhang nüshi). But that’s there, in China. In the case of international teams, where someone like Li Wei is a frontend developer, of course, it’s normal to write “Hi Wei.” But not “Hi Li.”

By the way, Chinese people often change their names when moving out of China. Jackie Chan, for example, was 成龙 (Chéng Lóng) back home, Bruce Lee was 李小龙 (Lǐ Xiǎolóng).

Richard Schmid | May 16 2024, 20:33

Richard Schmid is an amazing contemporary artist, whose books (specifically “Alla Prima II”) I often feel tempted to buy, but the price is quite high even for used copies (~$150-200), so I still haven’t bought it yet. For me, it’s still very expensive. By the way, in the book, he shows the process of creating his works layer by layer.

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 58 of them (as of now), unlike Facebook, which forgets (or ignores) almost half of them.

Echoes of Ancient Egyptian Innovations in Modern Science | May 10 2024, 23:23

A very interesting podcast about Ancient Egypt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDz45ELiquc

There, Viktor discusses how over thousands of years, at least two scientific disciplines—astronomy and medicine—were systematically developed in Egypt. In another segment, the host asks Viktor what he would do if he had a time machine. Viktor answered that he would like to hear how the speech of a king sounded (because we do not understand how the speech of the ancient Egyptians sounded, although we are familiar with their writing).

And here’s what I thought. Indeed, given a time machine, what could we bring back from the past that would be truly useful in the present? Obviously, 100% of Egyptian astronomy is useless to us from a scientific standpoint. But it’s a different story with medicine.

The fact is that the discovery of drugs is now largely done by trial and error (scientifically called “high-throughput screening” or HTS). HTS is a process of automated testing of a large number of chemical compounds for activity against a specific biological target (often a molecule, frequently a protein). The “hits” are then analyzed, followed by many more tests on organisms, where 99% are filtered out for various reasons. And there is hope that eventually, this will lead to a working drug.

Thus, in ancient medicine, things were simpler ethics-wise, and they immediately tested on humans. Take a poisonous mushroom and feed it to the sick in the hope of curing them. If the patient died, but (hypothetically) his hair grew, then it would make sense to give half the dose to someone who needed hair. Oh, he died too. So, next time we give a quarter.

So, it is generally useful for modern medicine to look back at ancient books.

One notable example is the development of artemisinin, a drug against malaria, inspired by an ancient Chinese text. Under the leadership of Tu Youyou, the team analyzed about 2000 ancient recipes and based on 640 selected prescriptions, they produced 380 extracts, which were tested on animals. In 1971, one of these, artemisinin, showed good antimalarial properties. It was manufactured from the plant Artemisia annua, following a recipe from the third part of Ge Hong’s book “Zhouhou Beiji Fang” (“Emergency Prescriptions at an Elbow’s Reach”), dating back to AD 340. Tu Youyou and her team isolated artemisinin from the plant, which proved to be very effective against malaria. This discovery earned Tu Youyou the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.

About Egypt, look it up. Viktor Solkin is very knowledgeable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDz45ELiquc