This chapter contains sections titled: Getting Under Her Skin Revolutionary Politics and Feminist Body Consciousness Homosociality Skinship Bonding, and Corporeal Feminism Meeting Narrative Needs Pricks as Needles Odd Girls Out ‘By the Father's Hand’: The Tattoo Taboo, Public Anxiety, and India(n) Ink The Skin She's In: Keeping Tattooing Personal and Political.

A work of Vietnamese art crossed a million-dollar mark in the international art market in early 2017. The event was reluctantly seen as a sign of maturity from the Vietnamese art amidst the many existing problems. Even though the Vietnamese media has discussed the issues enthusiastically, there is a lack of literature from the Vietnamese academics examining the subject, and even rarer in from the market perspective. This paper aims to contribute an insightful perspective on the Vietnamese art market, and (...) hesitantly the Vietnamese art as well, through the lens of fake, forgery and copy artworks. 35 cases of fake, forgery and copy paintings were found on the news and from the experts' wisdom. Through the examples, we argue that the Vietnamese art market is a temporary reaction to the immaturely rising of the Vietnamese art and the economy. Therefore, the art market is unable to function healthily unless the Vietnamese art and the economy developed. (shrink)

The aim of the following paper is to show that it is not possible to penetrate into the depths of Nikolay Raynov's universe and to comprehend its wholeness, without posing and investigating the question about the origin or the foundation of his various creative occupations, i.e his novels, philosophic and theosophic writings, art history and critique, paintings, decorative design etc. This question is far too complex to be answered briefly without being simplified, and therefore two main directions will be articulated: (...) the recption of Orphism developed in Plotinus' and Porphyry's Neoplatonism – which is the basis of modern Theosophy –, and the synthetic understanding of art, which puts Raynov's views in close proximity to Wassily Kandinsky and Nicholas Roerich. (shrink)

Explains the difference between pictorial and linguistic meaning, examines the works of Titian, Poussin, Ingres, Manet, Picasso, and de Kooning, and discusses art's psychological impact.

Paintings of music are a significant presence in modern art. They are cross-modal representations, aimed at representing music, say, musical works or forms, using colors, lines, and shapes in the visual modality. This article aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding paintings of music. Using examples from modern art, the article addresses the question of what a painting of music is. Implications for the aesthetic appreciation of paintings of music are also drawn.

This text reads into the work of Ibrahim Nubani (1962—), a Palestinian-Israeli painter who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1988, during the first Intifada. Nubani’s painting has undergone a tremendous change from the 1980s and the period of his hospitalization to his painting style today: from geometric, Modernist-type painting, gradually moving into his contemporary chaotic and saturated style of expression. I draw parallels between Nubani’s personal and psychological condition and the political events that affected him. I refer (...) to his state in relation to the discourse of mimicry and camouflage in nature, comparing his position to that of the invisible presences in the background in a perfect camouflage, referring to Roger Caillois’ interpretations. I look at his diagnosed psychiatric state of schizophrenia as the materialization of the meaning of being a Palestinian-Israeli in a life of fragmentation and rejection, by referring to Bhabha and Shammas. I relate to Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of schizophrenia as a cultural rebellion against the moderating mechanisms of cultural/national identification. I demonstrate how Nubani’s work and speech undermine the modalities of mainstream Israeli society, acting like a cultural insurgent, terrorizing Zionist axioms. While analysing Nubani’s iconography I identify several tropes, images and icons that serve as signifiers of his personal crisis and artistic development. I link Nubani’s eyes/ocelli images to Lacan’s discussion of ‘symbolic castration’ as the core of his personal becoming part of Israeli society and his collapse, the in-between desire to assimilate in the early stages of his life, and his current desire to fully live his life as a Palestinian. The text moves between his images and images from other sources that open Nubani’s world into the discourses of Western painting, schizophrenia, high Modernism, the postcolonial condition and so forth. The text is fragmented into eight pieces, following the schizophrenic break-up of Nubani’s personal state and his painted work. I read his work as a destabilizing agent, and identify visual references drawn from the wider context of art history, and specifically referring to masterpieces of the Israeli art canon. (shrink)

A provocative examination of the artistic interpretation of twelve of Borges’s most famous stories.

The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind--maybe even all of philosophy-- divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are.

This book aims to present trompe-l'oeil painting as an ambigous aesthetic ideal offered by early modern theory of art. It embodies the idea of an image identical to what it represents. It is interpreted in terms of perceptual and aesthetic illusion, mimesis, diegesis, play, irony and scientific illustration.

One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to (...) form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century--from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of reform to the mature masterpieces of Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the paintings of the Wanderers, Repin chief among them. By examining the classics of the tradition, Brunson explores the emergence of multiple realisms from the gaps, disruptions, and doubts that accompany the self-conscious project of representing reality. These manifestations of realism are united not by how they look or what they describe, but by their shared awareness of the fraught yet critical task of representation. By tracing the engagement of literature and painting with aesthetic debates on the sister arts, Brunson argues for a conceptualization of realism that transcends artistic media. Russian Realisms integrates the lesser-known tradition of Russian painting with the familiar masterpieces of Russia's great novelists, highlighting both the common ground in their struggles for artistic realism and their cultural autonomy and legitimacy. This erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history, and nineteenth-century realist movements. (shrink)

What painting does -- Systems of art historical and philosophical thought -- The place of painting: Velazquez's Las Meninas -- The limits of irony: Manet's painting -- The negativity of painting: Magritte's this is not a pipe -- Painting in the light of photography: Fromanger's methods.

This essay aims at neutralizing the contextualist challenge against traditional semantics. According to contextualism, utterances of non-elliptical, non-ambiguous, and non-indexical sentences may be associated with contrasting truth-conditions. In this essay, I grant the contextualist analysis of the sentences in question, and the contextualist assessment of the truth-conditions for the corresponding utterances. I then argue that the resulting situation is by no means incompatible with the traditional approach to semantics, and that the evidence put forth by the contextualists may easily be (...) taken into account by the customary treatment of natural languages. (shrink)

My thesis is that certain non-verbal paintings such as Picasso’s GUERNICA make (simple) arguments. If this is correct and the arguments are reasonably good, it would indicate one way that non-literary art can be cognitively valuable, since argument can provide the justification needed for knowledge or understanding. The focus is on painting, but my findings seem applicable to comparable visual art forms (a sculpture is also considered). My approach largely consists of identifying pertinent features of viable literary cognitivism and (...) then showing how they or close analogues can be applied to non-verbal painting. The two main features are the requirements, first, that the relevant knowledge is provided significantly in virtue of the distinctive essential feature of literary fictions, i.e., their fictionality, and second, that the knowledge stems primarily from the content of the work, not from what the auditor brings to the work. Some ways that literary fiction has been taken to be argumentative are explained, and striking similarities are found between argumentative literary fiction and argumentative painting. Potential objections are addressed, and I examine a proposed way to express, in a schematized format, both the power of an argumentative painting and its relatively simple associated propositional content. (shrink)

We humans continuously reshape the environment to alter, enhance, and sustain our affective lives. This two-way modification has been discussed in recent philosophy of mind as affective scaffolding, wherein scaffolding quite literally means that our affective states are enabled and supported by environmental resources such as material objects, other people, and physical spaces. In this article, I will argue that under certain conditions paintings function as noteworthy affective scaffolds to their creators. To expound this idea, I will begin with a (...) theoretical overview of affective niche construction and affective scaffolding. Then, based on the criteria of robustness, concreteness, and dependability, I will specify a solid type of affective scaffolding and propound paintings as a cogent case of such. In support of my argument, I will highlight two feelings typical to painterly creativity: the feeling of aesthetic resonance and the feeling of fusion. To conclude, I will discuss the overall contributions and limitations of my account. (shrink)

A short encyclopedia article focused on drawing, stressing facture, the physicality of three media.

In this paper, I discuss cases of replication in the visual arts, with particular focus on paintings. In the first part, I focus on painted copies, that is, manual reproductions of paintings created by artists. Painted copies are sometimes used for the purpose of aesthetic education on the original. I explore the relation between the creation of painted copies and their use as aesthetic surrogates of the original artwork and draw a positive conclusion on the aesthetic benefits of replica production (...) by artists. A skeptical conclusion follows regarding the use of such replicas as surrogates for the original painting. The second part of the paper concerns mechanically produced replicas, such as photographs and 3-D prints. On the basis of some of the claims made in the first part, I set conditions that mechanically produced replicas need to meet in order to function as aesthetic surrogates of an original. I argue that perfect aesthetic surrogates are either already available or at least possible. I conclude by considering two possible objections. (shrink)

The description for this book, Painting and Reality, will be forthcoming.

Manuscripts and notes by Michel Foucault on the visual arts recently deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal a reliance on canonical oil paintings by the ‘old masters’; a respect for the primary sources in the history of European art; an understanding of the necessity of research in both literary and visual sources, particularly self-portraits; and a sense of the value that a certain philosophical milieu – beginning with Sade and Nietzsche and expanding to his near contemporaries, Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski (...) – could offer to an understanding of paintings. The essay argues that Pierre Klossowski’s monumental drawing La Nef des fous (1990) provides an essential key for understanding the place of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same title in History of Madness and the centrality of theories of similitude to Foucault’s thinking about visuality ca. 1960–74. The later significance of the figure of the artist for Foucault can be traced to these earlier writings on painting and madness. (shrink)

This essay draws on Kenneth George's ethnographic study of the Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous and his art, as well as Pirous's own characterizations of his paintings as “spiritual notes,” to theorize and examine how paintings serve as ethical media. The essay offers a provisional definition of and methodology for “visual ethics” and considers how pictures and language can function quite differently as sites for ethical reflection. The particular painting analyzed here is a large temple mural of the death (...) of the Buddha located at Wat Unnalom, a prominent Buddhist monastery in Phnom Penh, painted in the 1980s by Cambodian artist Sum Pon. After discussing the lifeworld of Pon's Mahāparinibbāna and varied Khmer Buddhist interpretations of the painting, I suggest that the painting's rendering of “moral vision” helps us understand Buddhist ways of seeing more generally. I conclude by returning to George's question about how our understanding of ethics would change if we took pictures as the “fulcrum of moral relationships,” arguing that pictures can embody certain kinds of tensions or paradoxes that are difficult to explain and grasp discursively, such as paradoxes that arise from the inevitability and yet inexplicability of death as well as the tensions between Buddhist aims of cultivating “boundless” love and the particularities of our own individual experiences of love. (shrink)

This article is primarily concerned with the philosophical problems that arise out of a consideration of painting. By painting I mean of course not any kind of application of paint to a surface – house painting for instance – but painting as an art, to use Richard Wollheim's phrase. Since Plato, philosophy has intermittently been concerned with these problems, and over the past 30 years, painting has come under a new focus as philosophy of art (...) has increasingly turned its attention to the issues that arise from particular art forms. I will also draw on some ideas developed in art history and theory, which have a suitably philosophical, that is, general or foundational, character. There are many philosophical issues that arise equally from painting and other art forms, but for just this reason, they are best addressed in a broader cross-art-form context, and I will mostly avoid dealing with them here. Instead, I will focus on issues that arise solely or with a special force from a consideration of painting. It will be helpful to roughly arrange these in two categories. The first is representation; the second is form. We shall see that these categories are difficult to keep separate with regard to painting and overlap at various points. (shrink)

This paper explores Merleau-Ponty’s mature philosophy of painting as it emerges out of his essay, “Eye and Mind.” It does so by briefly outlining the ontology implicit in this discussion of the phenomenology of painting, an ontology that finds a more explicit expression in a consideration of other works by Merleau-Ponty, namely, The Visible and the Invisible and Phenomenology of Perception. This is an ontology of style, perspective, becoming. Having briefly sketched this image of the world, the paper (...) moves to a study of the phenomenological significance of Picasso’s famous Dora Maar au Chat. This is the primary aim of this paper: the staging of an encounter between Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist, and Pablo Picasso, the painter. We will find in this encounter the claim that it is by means of the painter’s style that he brings his world to life. In seeing the painting, we see along with it: we see the painter’s own way of seeing the world. In seeing the painting we are literally seeing seeing. But we do so by means of our own stylized perspectives, for vision, in Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, is itself already stylized. This is a pan-stylicism: an endless interplay of stylistic becomings the locus of which is the painting itself. As the emblem of this interplay, the painting is capable of disrupting profane vision, of awakening vision to the bottomless plenitude of being, and transforming it thereby. (shrink)

Anthony Rudd’s Painting and Presence: Why Paintings Matter is a monograph that spans the categories of aesthetics, philosophy of art, and religion. Rudd takes t.

This paper explores Merleau-Ponty’s mature philosophy of painting as it emerges out of his essay, “Eye and Mind.” It does so by briefly outlining the ontology implicit in this discussion of the phenomenology of painting, an ontology that finds a more explicit expression in a consideration of other works by Merleau-Ponty, namely, The Visible and the Invisible and Phenomenology of Perception. This is an ontology of style, perspective, becoming. Having briefly sketched this image of the world, the paper (...) moves to a study of the phenomenological significance of Picasso’s famous Dora Maar au Chat. This is the primary aim of this paper: the staging of an encounter between Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist, and Pablo Picasso, the painter. We will find in this encounter the claim that it is by means of the painter’s style that he brings his world to life. In seeing the painting, we see along with it: we see the painter’s own way of seeing the world. In seeing the painting we are literally seeing seeing. But we do so by means of our own stylized perspectives, for vision, in Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, is itself already stylized. This is a pan-stylicism: an endless interplay of stylistic becomings the locus of which is the painting itself. As the emblem of this interplay, the painting is capable of disrupting profane vision, of awakening vision to the bottomless plenitude of being, and transforming it thereby. (shrink)

The puppet arts in Bali can be found in the wayang Kamasan painting at Kamasan Village, Klungkung Regency. This painting inspired the creation and development of new handicraft in Bali. The objectives this research: 1. To find the wayang Kamasan painting in Klungkung Regency; 2. To find the development of handicraft types in Bali inspired by wayang Kamasan painting. This research used a qualitative descriptive approach, and data collection by observation, interview, and documentation. The results that (...) wayang Kamasan painting is estimated to have existed since the reign of the ancient Bali kingdom, which was during the reign of King Dalem Waturenggong in Semarapura Klungkung. The wayang Kamasan painting character painted on a canvas with a light brown base color, stiff, two-dimensional, and the description follows the applied standards. The figures depicted taken from Ramayana and Mahabharata story. The Balinese handicrafts inspired by wayang Kamasan painting include ceramics, wovens such as sokasi/keben, keris sheath, dulang, bokor, guitars, beruk, and others. The authors expect in the future the wayang Kamasan painting can survive, and emerges the world's concern for its preservation. (shrink)

This paper examines the use of the painting metaphor in the Republic, showing that earlier mentions of painting suggest an understanding of mimesis at odds with the critique of book X, and argues that this disagreement can only be understood in the dialogical context of the work as a whole. Early on, painters are said to be able to produce images truer and more beautiful than any existing object, and both the depiction of the city in speech itself (...) and its realization in practice are compared to the act of painting. Read in this context, the critique of mimesis in book X can be seen as a challenge to one of the central arguments of the Republic. But in critiquing images as representation of reality it leaves untouched the metaphorical use of images, and so allows the city in speech to fulfill its original purpose as an analogy for the soul. (shrink)

Relying on Husserl as well as on the reflections by Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne, Henry on Kandinsky and Deleuze on Bacon, this essay sketches some basic problems that arise in a phenomenological account of non-figurative painting. An investigation of the distinction between phenomenological and pictorial perception, of the transposition of the painter’s mode of perception into a painted image, and of the expressive force of paintings inevitably confronts one with the enigma of the appearing of something invisible. The essay proceeds (...) in three steps. The first step describes pictorial perception in terms of a ‘seeing according to’. Such a mode of perception pays attention to visual ambiguities, to the ‘gaze of things’ and to the conditions of visibility that are ordinarily overlooked. The second step moves on to the issue of the transposition of a pictorial perception in a painted image. Deleuze’s account of “manipulated chance” proves to be very helpful here. In the final step, Henry’s and Deleuze’s emphasis on the painting’s expression of totally invisible ‘forces’ is discussed. (shrink)

For Anselm Kiefer, his painting shows that, that something exists “shows that there is also nothingness.” The moment of visibility is also the moment of our exposure in/with/through nothing (in a gerundive sense) elemental in the happening of the visible. Painting bears ways of exposing the becoming of the visible and ultimately of consciousness, both sensible and intellectual, in/through/with emptying and nothing, i.e., in the happening of the seer and the seen, in that coming into being of existing, (...) we are exposed to the insight that “there is also nothingness.” The paper offers a series of transpositions, a series of ways of experiencing visibility and vision found in looking at specific images and paintings. The transpositions expose us to blindness, emptying, gaps, and loss in the happening of the visible, which, in displacing the certainty of rational subjective seeing/consciousness, lead to the quickening of vision and the visible anew. (shrink)

Research by academics, professional organizations, and businesses on ethics in the workplace often relies on surveys that ask employees to report how frequently they have observed others engaging in unethical behavior. But what do these frequencies in observer-reports say about the frequencies of committed unethical behavior? This paper is the first to address this question by empirically exploring the relationship between observer- and self-reports. Our survey research among the Swiss working population shows that for all 37 different forms of unethical (...) behavior investigated, observer-reports show higher frequencies than self-reports. Ratios of observer- to self-reports vary substantially among these forms, ranging from 1.46 for improperly gathering competitor’s confidential information to 6.4 for engaging in (sexual) harassment or creating a hostile work environment. The results indicate that researchers should not assume that the frequency in self-reports can generally be approximated by the frequency in observer-reports. Four possible explanations are presented for the differences in ratios, with recommendations for future research. (shrink)

This illustrated tale introduces children to the wondrous teachings from the Muslim theologian and mystic al-Ghazali (1058–1111CE) This enchanting tale illustrates how that the human heart is like a rusty mirror which, when polished through beautiful doings, is able to reflect the real essence of all things. In addition to this story is a poem by the renowned poet, Coleman Barks. Both draw on the same account found in Ghazali's The Marvels of the Heart, Book XXI, of his magnum opus,The (...) Revival of Religious Sciences. (shrink)

I raise two questions that bear on the aesthetics of painting and sculpture. First, painting involves perspective, in the sense that everything represented in a painting is represented from a point, or points, within represented space; is sculpture also perspectival? Second, painting is specially linked to vision; is sculpture linked in this way either to vision or to touch? To clarify the link between painting and vision, I describe the perspectival structure of vision. Since this (...) is the same structure we find in painting, the link is that painting manifests the perspective of vision. Touch is also perspectival, but the perspective involved is different from that in vision. Thus we can answer my second question, concerning the relations of the art forms to the senses, by addressing the first, concerning the role of perspective in sculpture. I argue that sculpture exhibits neither the perspectival structure of vision, nor that of touch. It is not perspectival, and it is not linked to either sense as painting is to vision. I close by considering the aesthetic significance of these conclusions. (shrink)

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others’ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. -/- Painters paint to feel. -/- They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform (...) the painter’s whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters’ own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. -/- The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters’ experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike. (shrink)

Poetry, painting, park. Goethe and Claude Lorrain KempfFranz R.legenda. 2020. pp. 260. £75. hbk.

In this essay, which is preceded by an interview with the translator, the author revisits her earlier critique of Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of the visible, but also takes further her own thinking by drawing specifically on the issues raised within the context of painting. The focal point of her discussion is Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Eye and Mind.”.

Paintings are usually paintings of things: a room in a palace, a princess, a dog. But what would it be to paint not those things, but the experience of seeing those things? Las Meninas is sufficiently sophisticated and masterfully executed to help us explore this question. Of course, there are many kinds of paintings: some abstract, some conceptual, some with more traditional subjects. Let us start with a focus on naturalistically depictive paintings: paintings that aim to cause an experience in (...) the viewer that is similar to the experience the viewer might have were they to see, in a way not mediated by paint, the subject of the painting. Of course, many or even most paintings do not strictly adhere to this aim; indeed, their artistry and expressiveness often consist in the ways in which this aim is subverted. For example, no viewer of the scene that Las Meninas depicts -- not even King Philip IV and Queen Mariana themselves -- would see what Velasquez paints in the mirror on the back wall. Other artists, such as Escher and Magritte, are even more blatant in their transgression of naturalism. But even in such cases, the aim of naturalistic depiction is the departure point for the aesthetic journey of perception and meaning. Asking our question is a natural consequence of rejecting dualism: if experiences are as much a part of the natural world as canvases, courtiers and Chamberlains, then they, too, should be capable of being painted. On the other hand, only the visible can be depicted in the sense described above, and rejecting dualism does not bring with it the implication that everything that is, is visible. One answer to our question, then, is pessimistic: there can be no painting of an experience, because experiences cannot be seen. Unlike the Infanta Margarita, and like justice, the number two, or feudal obligation, experiences, on this view, are not visible. But is this pessimism tenable? Wittgenstein writes: 'The timidity does not seem to be merely associated, outwardly connected, with the face; but fear is alive there, alive, in the features'. Similarly, McDowell maintains that we see another's pain in their expression, and their behaviour. To think otherwise invites solipsism. (shrink)

With this widely acclaimed work, Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood. "A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike.... An exhilarating book." John Barrell, "London Review of Books".

At the moment of its decline, we clearly see that painting in oils developed an original poetics, and one that was all of a piece, throughout a renascent and modern West. From its birth and during a development lasting half a millennium we see it— in Florence, Bruges, Venice, Rome, Toledo, Nuremberg, Amsterdam and Paris—attentive to the sources of signification: languages, rites, myths, theater, tools, techniques and sciences and the urban context that wove them all together. In each case, (...) for one or the other of them, it brought a new relationship to the way of life and then left them to their social order of assimilation, keeping the initial contact for those who would be interested. It studded the West with centers of production that carried the practice and knowledge of art to their limits; engaged with the collective imagination, it punctuated history with decisive works, in which the desire to paint takes action and explains it. Marked by an impatience for change, oil painting revealed itself in a rapport with creativity akin to the other works of civilization. It is at the level of the bases of invention of the imaginary—which are in any expression the most profound structures—that the unfolding of oil painting is tightly bound. The establishment of modern national languages, the orderly rise, around a syntax and because of architecture, sculpture, music, song, tragedy, the systematic construction of scientific and technical expression, arose and grew quickly in importance in Western Europe during the same centuries as painting and with reciprocal correspondence. Dürer “who was the first to publish a treatise in which is collected all knowledge having to do with the expression of forms… wrote in his native tongue and in so doing was revealed as the creator of technical and scientific German.”. (shrink)

This paper presents a “frame” representation for common sense knowledge and uses it to formalize our knowledge of “mundane” painting (walls; not portraits). These frames. while designed to aid a computer program to understand stories about the painting process, should be of use to programs which attempt to actually carry out the activity. The paper stresses a “deep” understanding of the activity so that the representation indicates not only what steps to carry out, but also how to do (...) them, and why they should be done. To accomplish this, while at the same time preserving modularity and nonredundancy, a system of interframe pointers is introduced (the COMES‐FROM and LEADS‐TO pointers) which explain how or why something is done in tens of knowledge given in other frames. The paper proceeds by steadily deepening an initial English‐like description of the activity, and a context free grammar for the representation is included. (shrink)