Ron Terada is a Vancouver-based artist who sometimes makes paintings (he is equally recognized for making sculptural installations and photo-based conceptual projects.) The “Jeopardy” series of paintings he executed in the years 1999–2000 have meticulously crafted coloured surfaces built up of many layers of pigment. Terada’s paintings are often referred to as “monochromes,” as if they were sin...

This article illustrates how the paintings of visual artists activate multiple brain processes that contribute to their conscious perception. Paintings of different artists may activate different combinations of brain processes to achieve their artist’s aesthetic goals. Neural models of how advanced brains see have characterized various of these processes. These models are used to explain how p...

F ore-edge decorations on manuscripts date back to the 10th century. Decorations can be seen when the book is lying on its side, a custom of the 15th and 16th centuries, and should not be confused with fore-edge paintings. Fore-edge paintings are not visible when the book is closed, but when the leaves are slanted or fanned, a beautiful miniature landscape appears. Fore-edge paintings are usual...

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...

From prehistoric times, man has felt the urge to depict the surrounding world on various substrates by using coloured materials. Historical paintings, such as prehistoric cave paintings, are often called ‘windows on the past’ and have allowed later generations to imagine how former human societies looked and/or functioned. Historical paintings are, therefore, considered to be a very valuable pa...

The influence of paintings on short time interval perception was studied. Three methods for time estimation were tested: direct scaling and two modifications of the method of reproduction – with and without simultaneous presentation of the painting whose duration was, reproduced. The results show that short time interval perception is influenced by such complex stimuli as paintings. The motor r...

Recently it has been claimed that some early Renaissance painters used concave mirrors to project real inverted images onto their supports (paper, canvas, oak panel, ...) which they then traced or painted over, and that this was a key source of an apparent increase in naturalism and realism in European painting around 1420. This bold theory makes implicit and explicit assumptions about the illu...

Indeterminate art, in which familiar objects are only suggestive, invokes a perceptual conundrum as apparently detailed and vivid images resist identification. We hypothesized that compared with paintings that depict meaningful content, object recognition in indeterminate images would be delayed, and tested whether aesthetic affect depends on meaningful content. Subjects performed object recogn...