On The Origin of the Milky Way by Peter Paul Rubens: Astronomy, Astrology and Mythology in Early Modern Europe*

Painted in the final decade of his life, Rubens’s autograph work The Origin of the Milky Way defies interpretation. The artist was a contemporary of Galileo though attempts to evidence a meeting have so far failed. He had already painted a series of night skies and had many recent books on astronomy/astrology, as well as ancient texts, in his library. This is a painting full of plausible stellar bodies none of which quite fits into a recognised constellation. Nor does the image accurately accord with any mythological narrative. So, is the Milky Way here simply a pretext to depict Juno as Queen of the heavens? I propose that Rubens was a learned eclectic for whom Aristotelian views of the cosmos could meld both with contemporary earth-centred arguments about a providential universe and with new Copernican theories. Uniting his interest in pictorial space with newfound possibilities for understanding the cosmos, Rubens draws on the ancient Roman concept of sparsio, or abundance, with which he would have been familiar through his friendship with Hugo Grotius. Executed a few years after the fifty-three-year-old artist had married his fecund second wife, then aged sixteen, The Origin of the Milky Way constitutes a witty and profound meditation on female generosity within a framework of universal laws.

Re-imagining the great masters: translations into print by John Drawbridge

<p>This thesis examines the prints of New Zealand printmaker, John Drawbridge, with a specific focus on a small but significant part of his print oeuvre, his mezzotints from the 1980s and 1990s, in which he directly quotes European great master artists. Drawbridge studied printmaking in London and Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s and it is this experience that informed his artistic practice for the rest of his career. Through his quotations of great artists and his practice of working in the hand-made printmaking tradition, Drawbridge recreates that Western tradition through his own technical expertise and imagination. However, what is distinctive about Drawbridge’s contribution to this well-established tradition is how he treats his source material: how he takes it out of its original context, and modernises and defamiliarises it by relocating it within a pictorial space that references his own life and location. In the first chapter, Drawbridge’s English and European experiences and education are examined to reveal the background to his work: the traditional printmaking processes and the cultural ethos of the period. The second chapter looks at the artistic scene in New Zealand after he returned in early 1964 and the varied reception to his work. These two chapters provide the necessary context for the concluding chapter in which a case is made for the symbiotic relationship between the European tradition Drawbridge so much admired and his concern to locate his work back in New Zealand. By means of intertextual references, he engages with and explores the nature of the art of the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the international and the local. This thesis argues that Drawbridge imaginatively critiques and renews the paintings he quotes in these translations from painting to print, and that consequently these prints reward a far more complex reading than they have been previously accorded. Through close examination of these prints it is clear that Drawbridge has made a unique contribution to New Zealand art.</p>

Re-imagining the great masters: translations into print by John Drawbridge

<p>This thesis examines the prints of New Zealand printmaker, John Drawbridge, with a specific focus on a small but significant part of his print oeuvre, his mezzotints from the 1980s and 1990s, in which he directly quotes European great master artists. Drawbridge studied printmaking in London and Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s and it is this experience that informed his artistic practice for the rest of his career. Through his quotations of great artists and his practice of working in the hand-made printmaking tradition, Drawbridge recreates that Western tradition through his own technical expertise and imagination. However, what is distinctive about Drawbridge’s contribution to this well-established tradition is how he treats his source material: how he takes it out of its original context, and modernises and defamiliarises it by relocating it within a pictorial space that references his own life and location. In the first chapter, Drawbridge’s English and European experiences and education are examined to reveal the background to his work: the traditional printmaking processes and the cultural ethos of the period. The second chapter looks at the artistic scene in New Zealand after he returned in early 1964 and the varied reception to his work. These two chapters provide the necessary context for the concluding chapter in which a case is made for the symbiotic relationship between the European tradition Drawbridge so much admired and his concern to locate his work back in New Zealand. By means of intertextual references, he engages with and explores the nature of the art of the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the international and the local. This thesis argues that Drawbridge imaginatively critiques and renews the paintings he quotes in these translations from painting to print, and that consequently these prints reward a far more complex reading than they have been previously accorded. Through close examination of these prints it is clear that Drawbridge has made a unique contribution to New Zealand art.</p>

Seeing Depth with One Eye and Pictorial Space

In my second post I questioned whether the integration of pictorial cues and binocular disparity occurs at the level of perception. In this third post, I push the argument further by questioning whether pictorial cues contribute to 3D vision at all.

‘Flying Shirts’ Creative Project: Vernissage

This analysis aims to present to a specialized public the artist’s conception and the process of creation of the ‘Flying Shirts’ project. Its creative interest is focused on the artistic intervention in everyday life objects, thus making them stand out and acquire the special meaning and status projection of ‘works of art’. An essential characteristic of this project’s different viewpoint is recognizing the authenticity of the Shirts as artefacts by embracing their unique attribute of personal belonging. This is the central point of reference in the creative programme, in which the original determines the character and state of phantasmal image. The paper considers some problems of composition, pictorial space, colour scheme and the means of expression in the construction of the visual language. The project was inspired by the intellectual and creative profile of the artist Tsanko Petrov (1942–2019), and was carried out in the belief that in its innermost essence every person’s being is linked with the whole Universe.

Trans‑Image in Viktor Sidorenko’ Creative Work

The aim of the article is to investigate the transformation of the image as a morphological unit of modern visual art on the example of the creative work of a Ukrainian artist and researcher of modern visual art Viktor Sidorenko. The research methodology is based on the methods developed in the works of J. Landsdown and S. Schofield, S. Yerokhin and others. The paper presents an attempt to study a new type of image – post-post-classical image, which has an ontologically transgressive character. The research has important implications for understanding the modern morphological changes in the visual sphere, the instrumental system of these changes that ensures the presence of its two mutually antithetical trends: transgressive and synergetic. The author analyzes the publications in which the link between the morphology of the visual sphere and the latest developments in the creation of visual space are explored. The choice of Victor Sidorenko’s creative work as a research material is not accidental. It is in the work of this artist that the genesis of the modern post-post-classical image and the transformation of its space as polymorphic can be clearly traced. The attraction to photographicity on the one hand, and author coding, on the other, becomes an ontological feature of V. Sidorenko’s authorial construction of pictorial space and in further creative searches. A certain culmination of this stage in the artist’s visual work is the already famous full‑scale visual project “The Mill of Time” (2003). It is in this project that V. Sidorenko creates a trans‑image as a space of a new type, in which photography, installation, painting, living objects and video projection create a post-classical type of image. The paper considers Victor Sidorenko’s creative work as a vivid example of the genesis of the image, whose ontological feature is its transgressive character. This is an image of the post-post-classical type, whose pictorial space can consist of classical, non‑classical and post-classical images. At the present stage, there have been changes in the strategies of representation of the trans‑image as such. The main strategy of its representation is a polymorphic visual project, which synergistically combines different types of images, bringing their semantic content beyond a stable visual form.