Names and faces
A Beatle and a Bee Gee are among the celebrated citizens who have been selected for knighthood and other awards given in the name of Britain’s monarch. Twice a year,
Britain’s Cabinet Office publishes a list of the people receiving honors for merit, service or bravery: just before New Year’s Eve and on the Saturday in June when Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday is officially observed. The New Year’s honors list made public late Friday revealed that Beatles drummer Ringo Starr and Barry Gibb, the oldest and last surviving of the brothers who made up the pop group the Bee Gees, have been tapped as knights. The process starts with nominations from the public, which first are reviewed by a specialist committee and then by a main honors committee. The nominations are then sent to the prime minister before the various honors are bestowed by the queen or senior royals. Michael Morpurgo, the children’s author celebrated for War Horse; Nick Clegg, a politician who fought in vain to keep Britain in the European Union; and many others, including renowned researchers, volunteers and actors, also made the honors list.
Chemical reactions are gradually darkening many of Georgia O’Keeffe’s famously vibrant paintings, and art conservation experts are hoping new digital imaging tools can help them slow the damage. Scientific experts in art conservation from Santa Fe, N.M., and the Chicago area announced plans last week to develop advanced 3-D imaging technology to detect destructive buildup in paintings by O’Keeffe and eventually other artists in museum collections around the world. Dale Kronkright, art conservationist at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, said the project builds on efforts that began in 2011 to monitor the preservation of O’Keeffe paintings using high-grade images from multiple sources of light. That prevented taking physical samples, usually postage-stamp size, that might damage the works. Destructive buildup of soap can emerge as paintings age. It happens as fats in the original oil paints combine with alkaline materials contained in pigments or drying agents. Tiny blisters emerge in the paint and turn into protrusions that resemble tiny grains of sand and can appear translucent or white. Thousands of the tiny blemishes can noticeably darken a painting. The creeping problem looms not only over O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of enlarged flowers and the New Mexico desert but also the vast majority of 20th-century oil paintings in museums, in part because professional-grade canvases from the period were primed with nondrying fats or oils, Kronkright said. To develop imaging technology that can assess the growth of the protrusions, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $350,000 to the O’Keeffe museum and a collaborative art-conservation center run by Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago.