Thomas Nozkowski: Paintings

Looking Through Paintings

Protein structure paintings.

When artist Steve Miller met Nobel Laureate Rod MacKinnon at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, MacKinnon was investigating protein structures: specifically, how potassium ions move across cell membranes. Miller became fascinated with the visual tools MacKinnon used to grapple with the problem: 3D computer models of proteins, graphical equations and diagrams in the scientist’s notebook...

Distinguishing paintings from photographs

We addressed the problem of automatically differentiating photographs of real scenes from photographs of paintings. We found that photographs differ from paintings in their color, edge, and texture properties. Based on these features, we trained and tested a classifier on a database of 6000 paintings and 6000 photographs. Using single features results in 70–80% correct discrimination performanc...

Johannes Molanus on Provocative Paintings

The first ecclesiastical writer to take the Tridentine decrees relating to the use and abuse of religious imagery1 as a starting point for an analysis of the question of nudity in art was Johannes M ~ l a n u s , ~ in his De Picturis et Imaginibus Sacris It is true that Gilio (Louvain 1 5 7 0 ) ~ ~ da Fabriano had already published his Dialogo degli Errori de' Pittori in 1564,~ the year after t...

Low Light Photography of Paintings

Similarly the tenth century Cholapaintings and 17th century Kayak paintings in the narrow and dark confines of the inner ambulatory of the Brhadisvara temple at Tanjore in South India, have been comprehensively photo-documented. Most of these were completely unseen by scholars and this photography has led to fundamental changes in the understanding of the historical development of painting in I...