painters

Many parents wish they could freeze a moment, preserve their children just as they are, but few have Thomas Gainsborough’s miraculous skill to achieve it. He painted his daughters Mary and Margaret – Molly and Peggy – with adoration, pride and sometimes anxiety, capturing, as Peggy, the narrator of The Painter’s Daughters puts it, a “closeness so thick you can feel it, our gaze always steady”.It’s ambitious to draw fiction from such beloved and well-known portraits, but Howes’s fictionalised Molly and Peggy don’t pale in…

Paulie Stewart was 48 years old and had been on the waiting list for a liver transplant for more than 500 days when, at death’s door, he was visited in Melbourne’s Austin hospital by Sister Helena, a young nun from Timor-Leste sent to comfort him on his journey to the other side. A priest had already read him his last rites.Stewart, singer of Melbourne punk band Painters and Dockers and Australian East Timorese reggae ensemble the Dili Allstars, thought Helena’s appearance must have been an omen. His association with…

The journey to capture reality with a bare minimum of shapes and colorsAn abstraction of the universe? Encoding may be seen as the art of abstracting the most salient patterns from reality. Such abstractions are indispensable for the purpose of generalization. For instance, consider the textbook example of recognizing cats in pictures. A trained neural network should be able to detect cats even in previously unseen images. This is only possible if the network can extrapolate its training observations.Under the hood, the…

At the end of May each festival year, Holly Larkin arrives at Worthy Farm to find a vast, rusting pile of metal bins, and starts to feel excited.She leads a team of about 90 volunteer bin painters, all of whom travel to the Glastonbury festival site to spend two weeks painting an estimated 17,000 bins, all taken from a gigantic pile that is so vast it can be seen on Google maps.Another group of 10 professional painters work on-site from April, and between them and Larkin’s team, they set about painting not only bins, but…