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The rich tapestry of renowned ballad culture, deeply interwoven with ecological consciousness and green health principles, forms the crux of this study. This paper delves into the metaphorical representation of water, not just as a source of artistic imagery but as a symbol deeply connected to green health - reflecting the interplay between human emotions, environmental sustainability, and traditional production life. Employing metaphor theory, we map 'water' as the foundational domain, transferring its inherent qualities to a broader ecological and healthfocused context, thereby constructing a nuanced art mapping mechanism that bridges water ecology and song. Central to our approach is the enhanced coupling model of watershed water ecological carrying capacity zoning. This model facilitates in-depth analysis of the cumulative interrelations between the functional zoning of water ecology, environmental stewardship, and the cultural-artistic essence of ballads. Our findings reveal a symbiotic relationship between varying water system cultures, characterized by hydrological frequencies of P-50%, 70%, and 90%. Each system fosters distinct water ecological cultures - reverence as the essence of life, gratitude as the value of life, and responsibility as the true meaning of life - which mutually permeate and influence one another across three distinct levels. Furthermore, this paper explores how the narrative and musical artistry of ballads can intertwine to enhance the listener's aesthetic experience, fostering an appreciation for the sensibilities of green health. This exploration allows for a deeper enjoyment of the songs and perpetuates the traditional Chinese cultural ethos of 'goodness is like water', highlighting its relevance in contemporary ecological and health discourses. Through this intricate exploration, the study aims to underscore the vital role of green health in the artistic and cultural interpretation of water within the realm of ballad music

Archaeologists have struggled for more than a century to explain why the first representational art of the Upper Palaeolithic arose and the reason for its precocious naturalism. Thanks to new data from various sites across Europe and further afield, as well as crucial insights from visual science, we may now be on the brink of bringing some clarity to this issue. In this paper, we assert that the main precursors of the first figurative art consisted of hand prints/stencils (among the Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens) and a corpus of geometric marks as well as a hunting lifestyle and highly charged visual system for detecting animals in evocative environments. Unlike many foregoing arguments, the present one is falsifiable in that five critical, but verifiable, points are delineated.

The pre-Hispanic art of the Lowlands of Paraná comprises very realistic to extremely simplified ceramic figurines made by complex hunter-gatherer groups during the Late Holocene. In particular, the article seeks to discuss the differences found between parrot and raptor figures, which are the most frequent motifs. Alternative styles of representation were involved in the visual symbolism of the two groups of birds with well-differentiated morphological and behavioural attributes. Whereas parrot images were elaborated with greater naturalism in sites mostly located in the middle Paraná, birds of prey exhibit a higher degree of stylization and schematization, especially in the lower Paraná. It is proposed that the differences in the artistic modalities used to represent these groups of birds could be related to the positioning of these animals within different metaphorical domains and opposable conceptual categories. It is also suggested that this iconography could be specifically linked to a totemic ontology, which implies a particular attitude towards nature. This study attempts to contribute to broadening our knowledge about the symbolic relationships between humans and animals in pre-Columbian America.

[...]any resemblance to actual people or incidents is merely coincidental. [...]Professor Bob Uno Flowerbed and Professor Jofrid Natalia Lightfountain saw the light of day. HUMILITY Many top-class academics rely on self-promotion by word of mouth (mostly their own mouth) because as far as they are concerned, creating an online university profile would be such a waste of valuable time. For presenters, one unit of conference presentation time is the equivalent of nine and a half units of regular time; for auditors, one minute of conference presentation time is equal to six minutes of regular time. [...]you can expect to receive 142.5 minutes (15 minutes × 9.5) for your riveting take on the (art) world.

Introduction: We describe a constellation of psychic symptoms in a professional painter with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy and hippocampal sclerosis, rarely described together in one patient, as well as the patient’s artistic representation of these symptoms. Case presentation: Prior to surgery, our patient experienced visual hallucinations, precognitions, out-of-body experiences, right unilateral mydriasis, and severe headaches, which led to a diagnosis of drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy. After surgery, she developed a visual field defect, retrograde trans-synaptic degeneration, anomic aphasia, foreign language syndrome, mirror writing, and Geschwind syndrome. Discussion: Each symptom is presented in comparison with previous reports of patients with similar symptoms related to temporal lobe pathology. Conclusion: Patients with temporal lobe disease may suffer from numerous and varied symptoms that often go unrecognized by physicians due to their unusual presentation. Young epileptic patients with temporal lobe disease may also express these symptoms through their artistic production.

To many men and women of color, as well as many white women, meaningful diversity occurs when the actual presence of different-looking bodies appears on screen. For them, this diversity serves as an indicator of progress as well as an aspirational frame for younger generations who are told that the visual signifiers they can identify with carry a great amount of symbolic weight. As a consequence, the degree of diversity became synonymous with the quantity of difference rather than with the dimensionality of those performances. Moreover, a paradoxical condition emerges whereby people of color have become more media savvy yet are still, if not more, reliant on overdetermined and overly reductive notions of so-called “positive” and “negative” representation. Such measures yield a set of dueling consequences: first, that any representation that includes a person of color is automatically a sign of success and progress; second, that such paltry gains generate an easy workaround for the executive suites whereby hiring racially diverse actors becomes an easy substitute for developing new complex characters. The results of such choices can feel—in an affective sense—artificial, or more to the point, like plastic. Black representation, as it's been understood in a popular sense, has been dominated by the circulation of mediated imagery yielding deleterious effects for the groups depicted. The fear of the effects of such “poor” representation has resulted in a set of binary, nonscientific, underdeveloped metrics—positive and negative—that constitute a nebulous catch-all system wherein the characteristics that define each pole on the spectrum shift depending on the era and the expectations of the audience. What marks a representation as “positive” or “negative”? Responses are often aligned with class (good job, education, community minded), behavior (hypersexual, well-spoken, “woke”), or with characterizations of character that either successfully assimilate into normative culture or fail to do so. However, such a scale oversimplifies the complexities of black identity that require audiences, pop culture critics, and scholars to invest in screen characters through experiencing nuances developed over time and ironically reinforces the stereotypes that operate as industry shorthand. The rationale for solely demanding plastic representation is understandable as a sanity-preserving tactic that can also build esteem and confidence, but it is not nearly enough. Meaningful, resonant diversity is a more difficult, underdeveloped approach that requires all stakeholders to think harder about what on-screen difference looks and feels like. But if representation truly matters, then it is an approach worthy of pursuit.

In a New York Times review of James Baldwin’s 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Mario Puzo writes that “A propaganda novel may be socially valuable… but it is not art.” Puzo’s claim is a function of what creative writing pedagogy scholar Janelle Adsit calls “the particular privilege that comes with a denial of marginalization.” Assumptions of rigid binaries that categorise people as either hetero- or homosexual, a phenomenon that scholar Kenji Yoshino calls “the epistemic contract of bisexual erasure,” create and reinforce harmful ideas about bisexuality. Bisexual representation in literature can operate as a creative resistance to the status quo, undermining the alleged necessity for a rigid binary system of sexuality. From James Baldwin’s 1968 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone to Jen Wilde’s 2017 Queens of Geek, this article traces representations of bisexuality in literature, with special attention to the ways in which bisexuality is demonstrated, described, and labelled in literature. However, while acknowledging the problematic representations of bisexuality in older fiction, such as Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, this paper resists a narrative of pure progress of bisexual representation, examining both problematic and nuanced representations in contemporary literature.

The few studies of the depiction of Black people in Western art have focused primarily on the rendering of Black men. This article discusses the depictions of Black women in the Rijksmuseum’s collection, specifically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the moment that Europeans and Africans met until about 1660, when representations became increasingly stereotyped. Black women in this period are depicted in a number of genres. The illustrations in travel journals and separate drawn records are concerned primarily with the differences in status between local inhabitants: the more clothes they wore, the higher their status. Yet the texts accompanying these depictions link nakedness to barbarity and lewdness. That nudity was retained as the way to represent allegorical Africa, in the form of a nearly naked Black female surrounded by wild animals, as was also prescribed in the iconographic manual by Cesare Ripa. When she was positioned in the company of the other continents, she was assigned a subordinate role as being less civilized and ripe for the taking. The Black woman also has a minor part as the allegory of Night or Darkness. In Biblical scenes the Black female is an individual character in some cases while in others she is a bystander, like white onlookers. There are no examples known of Black women who commissioned portraits themselves. There are, however, tronies that were intended to represent African facial features and a black skin, sometimes including an ‘exotic’ costume. Two etchings of Black females in everyday clothing might depict members of the Black communities that had settled in Antwerp, like they did in Amsterdam. Such illustrations made from life are too few in number, however, to express with subtlety the image of the Black woman countering the predominant image of her as an ‘exotic’, sexual apparition. It is possible that this analysis can be adapted on the basis of research into depictions in other – non-Northern-European – collections.

Representations of wounded animals and humans in European Upper Palaeolithic art have traditionally been conceived as figures related to the hunting activities of hunter-gatherer societies. In this paper, we propose an analysis of Franco-Cantabrian figurative representations showing signs of violence between 35,000 and 13,000 cal. bp to qualify the interpretations of hunting and death in Palaeolithic art. To this end, both multivariate statistical analyses and hypothesis tests have been used to highlight the formal, thematic, chronological and regional similarities and differences in these types of artistic representations. The results show that wounded graphic units are mythograms coded by different variables that do not seem to reflect the actual hunting of the animal, but rather a more complex meaning. It was also discovered that, in early times, the artist preferred to wound secondary or less frequent animals, like deer. This changed in more recent times, when the main animals, such as bison, are wounded under greater normativity and homogeneity in the Pyrenees or the Cantabrian region.