All posts tagged: abstract

American Abstract Artist Frank Stella Dies at 87

American Abstract Artist Frank Stella Dies at 87

Published by skeptic

The artist Frank Stella photographed by Christopher Gregory. Source: The New York Times.   Frank Stella, an American artist famous for testing the limits of abstraction across artistic media, died on Saturday, May 4 at age 87. In a statement announcing his passing, the artist’s New York representative, Marianne Boesky Gallery, said, “A giant of post-war abstract art, Stella’s extraordinary, perpetually evolving oeuvre investigated the formal and narrative possibilities of geometry and color and the boundaries between painting and objecthood.”   Frank Stella’s Early Minimalism Was Subversive and Successful Zambezi by Frank Stella, 1959. Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.   Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936 to Italian-American parents. By his early twenties, he had achieved critical and commercial success as a pioneering post-war artist in New York City. At the start of his career, Stella created a series of abstract works known as Black Paintings. Wielding a house-painter’s brush and commercial enamel paint, Stella applied evenly-spaced black lines onto a bare canvas. He painted about two dozen of these …

An Old Abstract Field of Math Is Unlocking the Deep Complexity of Spacecraft Orbits

An Old Abstract Field of Math Is Unlocking the Deep Complexity of Spacecraft Orbits

Published by skeptic

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The $5 billion mission is designed to find out if Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, can support life. But because Europa is constantly bombarded by intense radiation created by Jupiter’s magnetic field, the Clipper spacecraft can’t orbit the moon itself. Instead, it will slide into an eccentric orbit around Jupiter and gather data by repeatedly swinging by Europa—53 times in total—before retreating from the worst of the radiation. Every time the spacecraft rounds Jupiter, its path will be slightly different, ensuring that it can take pictures and gather data from Europa’s poles to its equator. To plan convoluted tours like this one, trajectory planners use computer models that meticulously calculate the trajectory one step at a time. The planning takes hundreds of mission requirements into account, and it’s bolstered by decades of mathematical research into orbits and how to join them into complicated tours. Mathematicians are …

Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

Published by José

I doubt I need to list for you the many titles of the 18th cen­tu­ry Ger­man savant and poly­math Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe, but allow me to add one or two that were new to me, at least: col­or the­o­rist (or phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist of col­or) and prog­en­i­tor of abstract expres­sion­ism. As a fas­ci­nat­ing Book­tryst post informs us, Goethe’s book on col­or, Zur Far­ben­lehre (The­o­ry of Col­ors), writ­ten in 1810, dis­put­ed the New­ton­ian view of the sub­ject and for­mu­lat­ed a psy­cho­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal account of the way we actu­al­ly expe­ri­ence col­or as a phe­nom­e­non. In his account, Goethe describes how he came by his views: Along with the rest of the world, I was con­vinced that all the col­ors are con­tained in the light; no one had ever told me any­thing dif­fer­ent, and I had nev­er found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no fur­ther inter­est in the sub­ject. But how I was aston­ished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon …

Abstract Expressionist Alfred Leslie Through 7 Paintings

Abstract Expressionist Alfred Leslie Through 7 Paintings

Published by skeptic

  Alfred Leslie (1927-2023) was a painter born in New York City. He was known for his involvement in the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1950s. He ended up changing directions over the course of his artistic career, and he was best known for large-scale figurative paintings like The Killing Cycle series. When viewing his work, one can see his New York upbringing reflected in the paintings, which deal with the complex and often gritty nature of urban life. His career and art remained illustrious until his death in 2023, incorporating bold figures and imagery in stunning portraits like Johnny Perry.   The Beginnings of Alfred Leslie Alfred Leslie by Alfred Leslie, 1974, via Art Institute Chicago   Alfred Leslie started out his artistic career as an abstract expressionist inspired by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann. Born in New York City where the abstract expressionism movement was centered, Leslie studied art at New York University after completing service with the U.S. Coast Guard in World War II. In addition to creating iconic …

Budd Hopkins: Abstract Art and UFOs | Joe Bucciero

Budd Hopkins: Abstract Art and UFOs | Joe Bucciero

Published by skeptic

The earliest work in Guardian, an exhibition at Tara Downs of seven paintings by Budd Hopkins, is a small abstract tondo, a circular canvas with tracks of off-white paint rising from the surface and bleeding onto a thin frame. Hopkins made it in 1963, six years before the show’s next painting; it at once looks forward to his future output and remains something of an anomaly. Circles reappear, at least in part, in all the other works on view, but each of them is what the critic Michael Fried would call a depicted shape—painted on a larger, typically rectangular surface—and not the literal shape of the canvas. In 1973 the curator April Kingsley, then married to Hopkins, wrote that the circle was his “personal image.” It was, she argued, like Rothko’s rectangle or, one could add, Jung’s mandala, both an ordering device and the sort of emblem one might see in dreams or visions. In the late 1950s Jung speculated that the postwar glut of UFO sightings in the West—reports of objects with “round shape, …

Lunar New Year traditions were abstract until my grandmother died

Lunar New Year traditions were abstract until my grandmother died

Published by skeptic

Most years, I visit my family in Taiwan for Lunar New Year. And each trip, since I was very small, I have found myself before a family altar, with a stick of smoking incense in my hands, wondering exactly what I’m supposed to do, think or say. None of my Taiwanese relatives ever offered any instructions that I can recall. In the convoluted balancing of family needs and desires that happens on these trips back home, a 7-year-old’s confusion does not carry much weight. My strategy has been to bow when everyone else does and affix an appropriately solemn expression on my face. But something clicked during this year’s trip to Taiwan, when I went with my aunts to light incense at the temple to honor our ancestors. And a lot of that has to do with my grandmother, who died in 2021. My grandma was the strongest person I knew. She had no schooling, but she raised four daughters and a son by herself after my grandfather suffered a car accident when my mom …

Modal Labs lands M to abstract away big data workload infrastructure

Modal Labs lands $16M to abstract away big data workload infrastructure

Published by skeptic

Modal Labs, a platform that provides cloud-based infrastructure to data teams and app developers, particularly those creating generative AI applications, has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners Lux Capital and Definition Capital. The cash infusion, which brings Modal’s total raised to $23 million, will be put mainly toward hiring, according to co-founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson. Modal plans to grow its team of 14 employees to 17 by the end of the year, with a focus on recruiting software engineers. Bernhardsson started Modal Labs in 2021 after a 15-plus-year career building and leading data teams. While working for Spotify, Bernhardsson was responsible for building the music recommendation system. Later, he became the CTO of fintech firm Better.com. Learning of Bernhardsson’s Better.com stint gave this reporter pause, frankly, considering Better.com’s history of botched layoffs, poor treatment of current and former employees, financial missteps, and high-profile executive departures. But Bernhardsson claims he left the company “quite a while” before any of that decision making. Whatever the …

Y Combinator–backed Patterns is building a platform to abstract away data science busywork

Y Combinator–backed Patterns is building a platform to abstract away data science busywork

Published by skeptic

Ken Van Haren and Chris Stanley were data scientists at Google and Square, respectively, who found themselves frustrated by how much time they were spending wrangling infrastructure versus doing actual data science. In surveying their colleagues, they found that it was a common problem. According to one poll, data scientists spend over half their time cleaning and organizing data and the majority of the rest collecting datasets. Aiming to streamline the grunt work, Van Haren and Stanley launched Patterns, a platform that abstracts away AI model engineering. Backed by Y Combinator and angel investor Lenny Rachitsky, Patterns recently closed a $2.5 million pre-seed round. “Patterns is the platform for any exec looking to prepare for the new world of AI, stay ahead of the transformation it will bring to their business and start building core AI features into their product and operations,” Van Haren told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We help companies to handle the incredible rate of progress of AI, which involves adapting to new models and paradigms quickly.” Patterns’ platform lets users …