A Portuguese Embassy to Siam in 1595 and Some Curious Observations

Information culled from the bio-account of Couttre, a Flemish jewel-trader, about a Portuguese embassy to Siam.

A pintura do autorretrato contemporâneo em portugal : breve panorâmica

Associado a histórias de fascínio, envolvendo conceitos como mitologia, lenda, simbologia, narcisismo, afirmação, reivindicações múltiplas, semelhança, realismo, naturalismo, introspeção… o autorretrato é repositório de uma imensa complexidade, suscetível de formulações inesgotáveis, na ótica da semântica e da polissemia. Na época medieval, a imagem que de si deixou o pintor remete para o esbatimento da identidade individual, dada a sua inserção em contextos de representações sagradas, ou a sua apresentação como personagem histórica ou mitológica. A autonomia intelectual foi reconhecida durante o Renascimento, sensível à representação do indivíduo e à valorização do retrato, com base na fi delidade ao motivo e na singularidade do indivíduo. O autorretrato conquistou a sua independência. Com o Romantismo afirma-se o autorretrato introspetivo, a caminho da negação da autoimagem fundamentada na semelhança/parecença, que vai acompanhar as tendências do não figurativismo, as quais aparecem e se desenvolvem no século XX. O autorretrato continua a mediar a busca identitária.

Pintar la nación indígena como una estrategia modernista en la obra de Eduardo Kingman (Dossier: historia del arte)

Este estudio centra su análisis en la obra pictórica de Eduardo Kingman como un modelo para describir los enfoques, tendencias e ideología que caracterizaron al Indigenismo. Esta corriente artística reunió a pintores, escritores e intelectuales ecuatorianos durante la década de 1930. El artículo propone que esta corriente surgió como una reacción al academicismo predominante en los salones y escuelas de arte. El estudio hace una revisión de las exposiciones, bienales y concursos en los que Kingman participó.Analiza las influencias artísticas y literarias reflejadas en la obra de este autor,sus relaciones con el Grupo de Guayaquil y su vinculación al Sindicato de Escritores y Artistas del Ecuador (SEA). Finalmente, recoge la opinión y reacción a su producción pictórica por parte de escritores, intelectuales y prensa en general.

Alfredo Pareja: ensayista y crítico (Del Historiador y el Ensayista)

La autora revisa la ensayística de Alfredo Pareja sobre temas de arte colonial, cultura y literatura. Da cuenta de la evolución de su noción de lo artístico desde 1933, cuando Pareja marca distancia con la generación anterior y con el arielismo vigente, al hacer suya la defensa del realismo social, más adelante, sin embargo, matizaría estos juicios en otros ensayos. Su postura crítica, en términos generales, no defiende la originalidad ni la forma del texto por sí mismas, sino el valor del contenido, el humanismo empieza a ser el hilo conductor de su narrativa e iluminador de su estética. Por otro lado, siente la necesidad de resignificar lo local en su contacto con lo universal, reconociendo el afán de contemporaneidad de su generación, su defensa de lo mestizo está presente en sus reflexiones sobre el barroquismo latinoamericano. Finalmente, resulta interesante que Pareja aproxime dos grandes momentos del arte ecuatoriano: la pintura y escultura colonial de la llamada escuela de Quito, y la propuesta estética de su generación.

Crops and cultures in the Pacific: new data and new techniques for the investigation of old questions

Fifty years ago Carl Sauer suggested, controversially and on the basis of theory rather than evidence, that Southeast Asia was the source area for agriculture throughout the Old World, including the Pacific. Since then, the archaeobotanical record (macroscopic and microscopic) from the Pacific islands has increased, leading to suggestions, also still controversial, that Melanesia was a center of origin of agriculture independent of South-east Asia, based on tree fruits and nuts and vegetatively propagated starchy staples. Such crops generally lack morphological markers of domestication, so exploitation, cultivation and domestication cannot easily be distinguished in the archaeological record. Molecular studies involving techniques such as chromosome painting, DNA fingerprinting and DNA sequencing, can potentially complement the archaeological record by suggesting where species which were spread through the Pacific by man originated and by what routes they attained their present distributions. A combination of archaeobotanical and molecular studies should therefore eventually enable the rival claims of Melanesia versus South-east Asia as independent centers of invention of agriculture to be assessed.

Language dominance and lexical diversity: how bilinguals and L2 learners differ in their knowledge and use of French lexical and functional items

This chapter compares lexical diversity of French words used by Dutch-French bilinguals, English-French bilinguals and Flemish L2 learners of French.

Utopia Ltd

Utopia Ltd. explores the relationship between utopian ideas and commodification, bringing together artwork by Blaise Drummond, Brendan Earley, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, David Mabb, Lizi Sanchez and Mary-Ruth Walsh. The seven artists’ work opens up a debate on the utopian within painting, sculpture, architecture, design and video.The works in Utopia Ltd. represent modernist architecture and design in its various mutations within a spectacularised, commodified 20th century consumer society. In these works, the utopian dream seems to burst through again and again, despite rather than because of the permutations of commodity culture. By picturing the past, present and possible future, the works destabilize fixed linear time. By rescuing, reclaiming and re-picturing, Utopia Ltd. suggests that utopian ideas persist in contemporary art, making a provocative demand on the viewer’s capacity to produce utopian dreams of their own. The exhibition’s title Utopia Ltd. is a satirical echo of an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, Utopia (Limited) or, The Flowers of Progress (1893), in which a utopian colony is turned into a joint stock company.

The credit relationship between Henry III and merchants of Douai and Ypres, 1247-70

This article looks at an important but neglected aspect of medieval sovereign debt, namely ‘accounts payable’ owed by the Crown to merchants and employees. It focuses on the unusually well-documented relationship between Henry III, King of England between 1216 and 1272, and Flemish merchants from the towns of Douai and Ypres, who provided cloth on credit to the royal wardrobe. From the surviving royal documents, we reconstruct the credit advanced to the royal wardrobe by the merchants of Ypres and Douai for each year between 1247 and 1270, together with the king's repayment history. The interactions between the king and the merchants are then analysed. The insights from this analysis are applied to the historical data to explain the trading decisions made by the merchants during this period, as well as why the strategies of the Yprois sometimes differed from those of the Douaissiens.

Sub-surface terahertz imaging through uneven surfaces: visualizing Neolithic wall paintings in Çatalhöyük

Pulsed terahertz imaging is being developed as a technique to image obscured mural paintings. Due to significant advances in terahertz technology, portable systems are now capable of operating in unregulated environments and this has prompted their use on archaeological excavations. August 2011 saw the first use of pulsed terahertz imaging at the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey, where mural paintings dating from the Neolithic period are continuously being uncovered by archaeologists. In these particular paintings the paint is applied onto an uneven surface, and then covered by an equally uneven surface. Traditional terahertz data analysis has proven unsuccessful at sub-surface imaging of these paintings due to the effect of these uneven surfaces. For the first time, an image processing technique is presented, based around Gaussian beam-mode coupling, which enables the visualization of the obscured painting.

Variation among Attic fine wares: the case of the Pan Painter's pelikai

This paper is a case study of the continuum between standardization and variation in the production of red-figure Athenian fine wares in the first half of the 5th century BC. An investigation of the Pan Painter's pelikai reveals that they fall into 3 distinct groups, according to size. While the pelikai in each group are also distinguishable from each other by shape, pattern, and iconography, the next clearest distinction between the groups (after size) is in their style of decoration. The pelikai in the largest group, which is comprised of small pelikai, are particularly distinct from the Pan Painter's broader oeuvre of ca. 220 vases insofar as they exemplify a lackadaisical painting style, which I have termed banausic, on account of its frequent use for images of craftsmen, women at work, and other such genre images. While this casual style is antithetical to the Pain Painter's refined style, for which he is better known, and which he employs for his large pelikai, affinities between the 2 styles—as judged by his confident line, anatomical details, and other technical features—permit the conclusion that this group of pelikai were executed by one and the same craftsman as the others. As with all of the vases attributed to this talented painter, however, the pelikai—whether large or small—are decorated with a great bariety of images. While most painted Athenian vases are understood to have been individually created, not mass-produced, the Pan Painter's coherent group of small pelikai seem to have been created en masse, in a uniform size and shape and with a distinct decorative style. This group of standardized vases represents a body of work executed under the influence or at the behest of a specific vase workshop. The form of the small pelikai in fact allows us to associate them with the Geras Painter. With his work on these small pelikai, perhaps in the latter part of his career, the Pan Painter may have intentionally minimized variability in favour of standardization, to meet market demands.

Morphosyntactic processing in advanced second language (L2) learners: An event-related potential investigation of the effects of L1-L2 similarity and structural distance

Different theoretical accounts of second language (L2) acquisition differ with respect to whether or not advanced learners are predicted to show native like processing for features not instantiated in the native language (L1). We examined how native speakers of English, a language with number but not gender agreement, process number and gender agreement in Spanish. We compare agreement within a determiner phrase (órgano muy complejo “[DP organ-MASC-SG very complex-MASC-SG]”) and across a verb phrase (cuadro es auténtico “painting-MASC-SG [VP is authentic-MASC-SG]”) in order to investigate whether native like processing is limited to local domains (e.g. within the phrase), in line with Clahsen and Felser (2006). We also examine whether morphological differences in how the L1 and L2 realize a shared feature impact processing by comparing number agreement between nouns and adjectives, where only Spanish instantiates agreement, and between demonstratives and nouns, where English also instantiates agreement. Similar to Spanish natives, advanced learners showed a P600 for both number and gender violations overall, in line with the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996), which predicts that learners can show native-like processing for novel features. Results also show that learners can establish syntactic dependencies outside of local domains, as suggested by the presence of a P600 for both within and across phrase violations. Moreover, similar to native speakers, learners were impacted by the structural distance (number of intervening phrases) between the agreeing elements, as suggested by the more positive waveforms for within than across-phrase agreement overall. These results are consistent with the proposal that learners are sensitive to hierarchical structure.

Analysis of red pigments from the Neolithic sites of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and Sheikh-e Abad in Iran

Samples containing red pigment have been collected from two different archaeological sites dating to the Neolithic (Çatalhöyük in Turkey and Sheikh-e Abad in Iran) and have been analysed by a range of techniques. Sub-samples were examined by IR spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction, whilst thin sections were studied using optical polarising microscopy, synchrotron based IR microscopy and environmental scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray analysis. Thin layers of red paint in a wall painting from Çatalhöyük were found to contain ochre (hematite and clay) as well as an unexpected component, grains of red and colourless obsidian, which have not been identified in any previous studies of the wall paintings at Çatalhöyük. These small grains of obsidian may have improved the reflective properties of the paint and made the artwork more vivid in the darkness of the buildings. Analysis of a roughly shaped ball of red sediment found on a possible working surface at Sheikh-e Abad revealed that the cause of the red colouring was the mineral hematite, which was probably from a source of terra rossa sediment in the local area. The results of this work suggest it is unlikely that this had been altered by the Neolithic people through mixing with other minerals.

Nowhere

Nowhere is part on the series notebook architecture. The painting works with a language of forms to construct rather than represent architectural space. What the painting seeks to construct is a dialogue on depth wherein painting is conceived as quasi phenomenological project.

Screens

Summer Saloon presented at Lion and Lamb an exhibition venue dedicated to showing current painting. My work "Screens" constructs rather than represents an existing architectural space. The painting investigates an experience of phenomenological depth distinct from the model of perspective depth.

John Wikins

My essay is an analysis of the paintings of John Wilkins that contextualizes his mode of abstract painting within the semiological turn of post eighties painting.