Tag Archives: Van Gogh

Google Arts & Culture: an app for culture vultures

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In its drive to take over single aspect of our lives in the most charming, helpful, and delightful ways possible, Google has developed its Arts & Culture app.

Here’s more from a July 19, 2016 article by John Brownlee for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

… Google has just unveiled a new app that makes it as easy to find the opening times of your local museum as it is to figure out who painted that bright purple Impressionist masterpiece you saw five years ago at the Louvre.

It’s called Google Arts & Culture, and it’s a tool for discovering art “from more than a thousand museums across 70 countries,” Google writes on its blog. More than just an online display of art, though, it encourages viewers to parse the works and gather insight into the visual culture we rarely encounter outside the rarified world of brick-and-mortar museums.

For instance, you can browse all of Van Gogh’s paintings chronologically to see how much more vibrant his work became over time. Or you can sort Monet’s paintings by color for a glimpse at his nuanced use of gray.

You can also read daily stories about subjects such as stolen Nazi artworks or Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. …

A July 19, 2016 post announcing the Arts & Culture app on the Google blog by Duncan Osborn provides more details,

Just as the world’s precious artworks and monuments need a touch-up to look their best, the home we’ve built to host the world’s cultural treasures online needs a lick of paint every now and then. We’re ready to pull off the dust sheets and introduce the new Google Arts & Culture website and app, by the Google Cultural Institute. The app lets you explore anything from cats in art since 200 BCE to the color red in Abstract Expressionism, and everything in between.

…

• Search for anything, from shoes to all things gold • Scroll through art by time—see how Van Gogh’s works went from gloomy to vivid • Browse by color and learn about Monet’s 50 shades of gray • Find a new fascinating story to discover every day—today, it’s nine powerful men in heels

You can also use this app when visiting a real life museum. For the interested, you can download it for for iOS and Android.

Over 100,000 images from Wellcome Trust made available for download

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Earlier this month there were notices about the UK’s Wellcome Trust making their images freely available which I promptly forgot about. Thanks to Mark Lorch’s Jan. 30, 2014 post on the Guardian science blogs I’ve been reminded (Note: Links have been removed),

The UK’s leading medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, has donated a treasure trove to the world: more than 100,000 images covering the history of all aspects of medicine, science and technology are now freely available to any and all.

The database contains pictures of weird and wonderful medical instruments, copies of historical documents and stunning examples of science-related works of art, from Van Goghs to cartoons. It’s a joy just to peruse the library, jumping from one fascinating image to the next.But, being a chemist, I was of course particularly drawn to the documents and apparatus depicting the history of my chosen field. …

Lorch includes a number of images including a copy of what appears to be some graffiti written by James Crick (of Watson & Crick & the double helix) but my favourite is this periodic table of elements model (Note: A link has been removed),

Model showing the periodic elements of chemistry Photograph: Wellcome Images

Model showing the periodic elements of chemistry Photograph: Wellcome Images

Finally, the mundane but no less fascinating. How about a cunning 3D representation of the periodic table lovingly mounted in a jam jar!

A January 20, 2014 Wellcome Images news release provides more details about their newly available offerings,

Over 100,000 images ranging from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya are now available for free download as hi-res images on our website.

Drawn from the historical holdings of the world-renowned Wellcome Library, the images are being released under the Creative Commons-Attribution only (CC-BY) licence. This means that all the historical images can be downloaded here to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you wish, for personal or commercial use as long as the source Wellcome Library is attributed.

The historical collections offer a rich body of historical images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements. The earliest item is a 3000 year old Egyptian prescription on papyrus, and treasures include exquisite medieval illuminated manuscripts and anatomical drawings, ranging from delicate 16th century fugitive sheets, whose hinged paper flaps reveal hidden viscera, to Paolo Mascagni’s vibrantly coloured etching of an ‘exploded’ torso.

From the beauty of a Persian horoscope for the 15th-century prince Iskandar to sharply sketched satires by Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank, the collection is sacred and profane by turns. Photography includes Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion, John Thomson’s remarkable nineteenth century portraits from his travels in China and a newly added series of photographs of hysteric and epileptic patients at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital.

Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, says “Together the collection amounts to a dizzying visual record of centuries of human culture, and our attempts to understand our bodies, minds and health through art and observation. As a strong supporter of open access, we want to make sure these images can be used and enjoyed by anyone without restriction.”

Catherine Draycott, Head of Wellcome Images says, “Wellcome Images is an invaluable visual resource for anyone interested in themes around medicine and the wider history of health and we are delighted to make our growing archive of historical images freely available to all, and provide the mechanism for direct access to them. We hope that users, both personal and commercial take full advantage of the material available.”

Our specialist team of researchers at Wellcome Images are available to advise and assist with sourcing and searching for images and can be contacted at images@wellcome.ac.uk.

All of those references to Van Gogh piqued my curiosity. Here’s one of the images you’ll find if you search Van Gogh,

Credit: Wellcome Library, London Paul Ferdinand Gachet. Etching by V. van Gogh, 1890.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
Paul Ferdinand Gachet. Etching by V. van Gogh, 1890.

Here’s the story provided by the Wellcome staff,

Paul-Ferdinand Gachet (1828-1909) was a maverick physician who practised what later came to be called complementary or alternative medicine. He had a consulting room in Paris to which he commuted from his house in Auvers-sur-Oise outside the city. He was an art lover, being an amateur artist, an art collector, and a friend of many artists, one of them being the Dutchman Vincent Van Gogh. Gachet and Van Gogh only knew each other for a couple of months, from 20 May 1890 when Van Gogh arrived to stay in a lodging house in Auvers, to 27 July 1890, when he shot himself. Van Gogh, suffering from a form of mania, was producing one painting a day at that time, but, with Gachet’s help, was able to draw this etched portrait to be printed on Gachet’s printing press, probably after Sunday lunch at Gachet’s house on 15 June 1890. Gachet’s moist-eyed portrayal reflects Van Gogh’s impression that Gachet was “sicker than I am”, but it could in turn result from the fact that the sitter was looking at the artist and contemplating his lamentable mental state. This impression of the print was bought by Henry S. Wellcome from Gachet’s son, Paul Louis Gachet, in 1927, together with many other items of Gachet personalia. The cat in the bottom margin is the stamp certifying the print’s provenance from Paul-Louis Gachet.

It is a fascinating image resource although you may find, as I did, some of it is a bit creepy, e.g., the tattoo section brought up images of tattoos on excised human skin amongst the paintings of tattooed individuals and images of patterns used in tattoos.

Beautiful animations of Van Gogh’s paintings by Luca Agnani

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Sometimes you need a feast for the spirit,

Via Jennifer Miller’s July 25, 2013 article for Fast Company.

This piece was published by the artist Luca Agnani (you will need Italian language skills for Agnani’s site) on YouTube on May 22, 2013 where he noted the titles of the Van Gogh paintings and music in his animation,

Real Painting
http://www.131076.com/van-gogh

1. Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries
2. Langlois Bridge at Arles, The
3. Farmhouse in Provence
4. White House at Night, The
5. Still Life
6. Evening The Watch (after Millet)
7. View of Saintes-Maries
8. Bedroom
9. Factories at Asnieres Seen
10. White House at Night, The
11. Restaurant
12. First Steps (after Millet)
13. Self-Portrait

Music: Experience – Ludovico Einaudi

Have a lovely weekend!

Nanotechnology-enabled art scanning project gets rough

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Recently, a series of television programmes about art, authentication, and forgeries were broadcast in my area (Fake or Fortune on Knowledge Network) and there was one question I kept asking myself, why aren’t they using some nanotechnology-enabled techniques to decide? I think the answer is pretty simple, they wanted to build suspense rather than answer questions quickly, otherwise, there wouldn’t have been much to broadcast.

Meanwhile, the technology to detect art forgeries and/or to identify art objects continues to be developed as per a Mar. 19, 2013 post by Benjamin Sutton for artinfo.com blog, In The Air (Note: Links have been removed),

An artist’s signature and an artwork’s certificate of authenticity can easily be forged, but you know what cant? A 3D nano-scan of the object’s roughness down to a level as precise as one one-thousandth of a millimeter. That’s exactly how conservation scientist Bill Wei plans to revolutionize the way artworks are authenticated and tracked, Wired U.K. reports, with his new project Fing-Art Print.

Here’s more about the Fing-Art Print system in the Mar. 19, 2013 article by Victoria Turk for Wired UK (Note: A link has been removed),

The Fing-Art Print consists of a NanoFocus uSurf confocal profilometer, which enables non-contact surface analysis, on a robotic arm, measuring tiny differences in height across the object to produce a three-dimensional false colour image. But Wei wants to take the technology beyond the museum. “The idea is to also fight illegal trafficking of archaeological objects,” he explains. The lack of security at digs in the Middle East, for example, makes objects vulnerable to plundering. If they were fingerprinted immediately on discovery, stolen goods could be easily identified.

I found more information about this technique and an illustrative .gif on the Fing-Art Print project website Method page,

animatieAlso from the Method page,

How does it work?

  • the owner selects an area on the object of several square millimeters
  • the micro-roughness of this area is scanned using a non-contact profilometer
  • the scan contains roughness information on a micrometer scale
  • this unique information is put in a database

This method of examining is nondestructive as stated on the project’s home page,

The FINGaRtPRINT project was conducted in order to develop a system to ”fingerprint” objects of art and cultural heritage. The system provides a long sought after non-destructive, non-contact method for uniquely identifying these objects. Objects and collections which are fingerprinted can be easily identified. As part of an (inter)national database network, fingerprints can be used to re-identify recovered objects and protect against illegal trafficking of cultural heritage.

Btw and for folks like me, the painting in the .gif is The Garden of Daubigny (1890) by Vincent Van Gogh from the Collection Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation).

Winslow Homer, Van Gogh, and nanotechnology

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A few years back I wrote up a story about Winslow Homer and his painting, For to Be a Farmer’s Boy, which had a nanotechnology angle. The painting,part f the Art Institute of Chicago’s (AIC) collection, was examined using the Surface Enhanced Raman Spectrometry (SERS) technique and I found the art conservation application so interesting I included the story in my The Nanotech Mysteries wiki on the Scientists get artful page.

The April 5, 2011 article [ETA: Link added Feb. 10, 2013] by Francesca Casadio on physorg.com  has more technical detail about the conservation process and the painting. It also mentions The Bedroom by Van Gogh,

… they are both displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). Homer’s painting represents a high point in the career of America’s premiere watercolorist, while Van Gogh’s painting is perhaps one of most recognizable paintings in the world. However, they also share a key physical trait.

“These breathtaking artworks are both painted with colorants that are sensitive to light, or, as we say in museums, they are ‘fugitive,’ meaning they quickly vanish if exposed to too much light,” says Francesca Casadio, A.W. Mellon senior conservation scientist at the AIC. “Fading can dramatically change the color balance of fragile works of art and go so far as to obfuscate, in part, the artist’s intended effect.”

Here’s how it works,

By using a colloidal suspension of silver nanoparticles as a “performance enhancing drug,” researchers, for the first time, can identify natural organic colorants on a single grain of pigment otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

SERS analysis
Indeed, only a handful of pigment particles were available from the Homer watercolor. Compared to reference 19th century watercolor pigments available at AIC, these colorants were identified as Indian purple (cochineal precipitated with copper sulfate) and madder purple, two natural dyestuffs derived from an insect and vegetable-root sources, respectively.
The results indicate that in Homer’s For to Be a Farmer’s Boy, the “empty” sky once depicted a vibrant autumn sunset, with organic purples and reds, in addition to inorganic reds and yellows.

The Art Institute of Chicago has a page about this painting where they have a digital simulation that allows you to see the original before and after the restoration.

I did cover Van Gogh’s The Bedroom in a March 16, 2010 posting (scroll down) about the Amsterdam Museum and its restoration efforts. The museum staff wrote a blog about the painting and the process as they restored it. The last posting on the blog indicates that The Bedroom was going to be in Japan until April 10, 2011 and then it was being returned to the Amsterdam Museum. I wonder if the painting’s current residency at the AIC is a consequence of the earthquake, tsunami, and reactor situations in Japan.

Painting whisperers: McGill University scientists develop photoacoustic technique for art restoration

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Listening to a paint pigment to determine its composition is a new technique for art restoration that scientists at McGill University (Montréal, Canada) have developed. From the news release,

A team of McGill chemists have discovered that a technique known as photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy could be used to identify the composition of pigments used in art work that is decades or even centuries old. Pigments give artist’s materials colour, and they emit sounds when light is shone on them.

“The chemical composition of pigments is important to know, because it enables museums and restorers to know how the paints will react to sunlight and temperature changes,” explained Dr. Ian Butler, lead researcher and professor at McGill’s Department of Chemistry. Without a full understanding of the chemicals involved in artworks, preservation attempts can sometimes lead to more damage than would occur by just simply leaving the works untreated.

Photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy is based on Alexander Graham Bell’s 1880 discovery that showed solids could emit sounds when exposed to sunlight, infrared radiation or ultraviolet radiation. Advances in mathematics and computers have enabled chemists to apply the phenomenon to various materials, but the Butler’s team is the first to use it to analyze typical inorganic pigments that most artists use.

The researchers have classified 12 historically prominent pigments by the infrared spectra they exhibit – i.e., the range of noises they produce – and they hope the technique will be used to establish a pigment database. “Once such a database has been established, the technique may become routine in the arsenal of art forensic laboratories,” Butler said. The next steps will be to identify partners interested in developing standard practices that would enable this technique to be used with artwork.

Strictly speaking this is not usually in my bailiwick but art restoration does interest me and there’s been a fair amount of interest in using nanotechnology-enabled techniques to minimize the damage that art restoration paradoxically imposes as conservators try to save the art work. There is a blog for the restoration of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom (no nano-enabled techniques) which is taking place at the Van Gogh Museum (first mentioned here in my March 16, 2010 posting).

Science policy, innovation and more on the Canadian 2010 federal budget; free access in the true north; no nano for Van Gogh’s The Bedroom; frogs, foam and biofuels

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There are more comments about Canada’s 2010 federal budget on the Canadian Science Policy Centre website along with listings of relevant news articles which they update regularly. There’s also a federal budget topic in the forums section but it doesn’t seem have attracted much commentary yet.

The folks at The Black Hole blog offer some pointed commentary with regard to the budget’s treatment of post doctorate graduates. If I understand the comments correctly, the budget has clarified the matter of taxation, i. e., post doctoral grants are taxable income, which means that people who were getting a break on taxes are now losing part of their income. The government has also created a new class of $70,000 post doctoral grants but this will account for only 140 fellowships. With some 6000 post doctoral fellows this means only 2% of the current pool of applicants will receive these awards. Do read The Black Hole post as they clarify what this means in very practical terms.

There’s been another discussion outcome from the 2010 budget, a renewed interest in innovation. I’m kicking off my ‘innovation curation efforts’ with this from an editorial piece by Carol Goar in the Toronto Star,

Five Canadian finance ministers have tried to crack the productivity puzzle. All failed. Now Jim Flaherty is taking a stab at it.

Here is the conundrum: We don’t use our brainpower to create new wealth. We have a highly educated population, generous tax incentives for research and development and lower corporate tax rates than any leading economic power. Yet our businesses remain reluctant to invest in new products and technologies (with a few honourable exceptions such as Research in Motion, Bombardier and Magna). They don’t even capitalize on the exciting discoveries made in our universities and government laboratories.

…

Economists are starting to ask what’s wrong. Canada ranked 14th in business spending on research and development – behind all the world’s leading industrial powers and even smaller nations such as Belgium and Ireland – in the latest statistical roundup by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

I believe she’s referring to the 2009 OECD scorecard in that last bit (you can find the Canada highlights here).

There are many parts to this puzzle about why Canadians and their companies are not innovative.  Getting back to Goar’s piece,

Kevin Lynch, who served as Stephen Harper’s top adviser from 2006 to 2009 [and is now the vice-chair of the Bank of Montreal Financial Group], has just written an article in Policy Options, an influential magazine, laying the blame squarely on corporate Canada. He argues that, unless business leaders do their part, it makes little sense to go on spending billions of dollars on research and development. “In an era of fiscal constraint, there has to be a compelling narrative to justify new public investments when other areas are being constrained,” he says.

Here’s a possible puzzle piece, in yesterday’s (March 15, 2010) posting I noted a study by academic, Mary J. Benner, where she pointed out that securities analysts do not reward/encourage established US companies such as Polaroid (now defunct) and Kodak to adopt new technologies. I would imagine that the same situation exists here in Canada.

For another puzzle piece: I’ve made mention of the mentality that a lot of entrepreneurs (especially in Canadian high tech) have and see confirmation  in a Globe and Mail article by Simon Avery about the continuing impact of the 2000 dot com meltdown where he investigates some of the issues with venture capital and investment as well as this,

“It’s a little bit about getting into the culture of winning, like the Olympics we just had,” says Ungad Chadda, senior vice-president of the Toronto Stock Exchange. “I don’t think the technology entrepreneurs around here are encouraged and supported to think beyond the $250-million cheque that a U.S. company can give them.”

One last comment from  Kevin Lynch (mentioned in the second of the Goar excerpts) about innovation and Canada from his recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail,

A broader public dialogue is essential. We need to make the question “What would it take for Canada to be an innovative economy for the 21st century?” part of our public narrative – partly because our innovation deficit is a threat to our competitiveness and living standards, and partly because we can be a world leader in innovation. We should aspire to be a nation of innovators. We should rebrand Canada as technologically savvy, entrepreneurial and creative.

Yes, Mr. Lynch a broader dialogue would be delightful but there does seem to be an extraordinary indifference to the notion from many quarters. Do I seem jaundiced? Well, maybe that’s because I’ve been trying to get some interest in having a Canadian science policy debate and not getting very far with it. In principle, people call for more dialogue but that requires some effort to organize and a willingness to actually participate.

(As for “rebranding”, is anyone else tired of hearing that word or its cousin branding?)

On a completely other note, the University of Ottawa has announced that it is supporting open access to its faculty’s papers with institutional funding. From the news release,

According to Leslie Weir, U of Ottawa’s chief librarian, the program encompasses several elements, including a new Open Access (or OA) repository for peer-reviewed papers and other “learning objects”; an “author fund” for U of Ottawa researchers to help them cover open-access fees charged by journal publishers; a $50,000-a-year budget to digitize course materials and make them available to anyone through the repository; and support for the University of Ottawa Press’s OA journals.

…

But the university stopped short of requiring faculty members to deposit their papers with the new repository. “We all agreed that incentives and encouragement was the best way to go,” said Ms. Weir, who worked on the program with an internal group of backers, including Michael Geist, professor of intellectual property law, and Claire Kendall, a professor in the faculty of medicine who has been active in OA medical journals.

There is some criticism of the decision to make the programme voluntary. Having noticed the lack of success that voluntary reporting of nanomaterials has had, I’m inclined to agree with the critics. (Thanks to Pasco Phronesis for pointing me to the item.)

If you’ve ever been interested in art restoration (how do they clean and return the colours of an old painting to its original hues?, then the Van Gogh blog is for you. A member of the restoration team is blogging each step of The Bedroom’s (a famous Van Gogh painting) restoration. I was a little surprised that they don’t seem to be using any of the new nano-enabled techniques for examining the painting or doing the restoration work.

Given the name for this website, I have to mention the work done with frogs in pursuit of developing new biofuels by scientists at the University of Cincinnati. From the news item on Nanotechnology Now,

In natural photosynthesis, plants take in solar energy and carbon dioxide and then convert it to oxygen and sugars. The oxygen is released to the air and the sugars are dispersed throughout the plant — like that sweet corn we look for in the summer. Unfortunately, the allocation of light energy into products we use is not as efficient as we would like. Now engineering researchers at the University of Cincinnati are doing something about that.

The researchers are finding ways to take energy from the sun and carbon from the air to create new forms of biofuels, thanks to a semi-tropical frog species [Tungara frog].

…

Their work focused on making a new artificial photosynthetic material which uses plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes, trapped within a foam housing, to produce sugars from sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Here’s an illustration of the frog by Megan Gundrum, 5th year DAAP student (I tried find out what DAAP stands for but was unsuccessful, ETA: Mar.31.10, it is the Design, art, and architecture program at the University of Cincinnati),

illustration by Megan Gundrum, 5th year DAAP student

Thank you to the University of Cincinnati for making the image available.