Monday 11 August 2008

I got invited to a Cocktail Party!

Writer Jennifer Ouellette wonders But is it art? over at Cocktail Party Physics. It's a great article, featuring many different artists and visually-creative people who incorporate science into their work. Ms. Ouellette has included my oil painting, My Life With Trilobites, in the article. Nifty!

In particular I am impressed with the work of skateboarder/artist Lia Halloran. All the work is pretty cool.

The supposed division between artists and scientists is so small, and so many other people like myself straddle both worlds. It make organising my blogroll tough, and interesting.

I mean, where do you place people like the talented Marek Eby, who has created such iconic images and clothing of prehistoric creatures and blogs about palaeontology? I have him in science right now, but his cartoons and images could easily go the other way. Same with Fresh Brainz, and Laelaps - both feature excellent photography on a regular basis.

On the flipside, I have placed Bond's Blog, Prehistoric Insanity, Olduvai George and When Pigs Fly Returns in my artsy links, to name a few. Each of these talented people features artwork ranging from line drawings to 3D rendering from time to time, and each is strongly interested or involved in palaeontology.

All this means to me, I think is that art and science do not need to be told to stay on their own side in the back seat. We can play nice.

One last question though: where do you place The Flying Trilobite? Under art, or science?
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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details.

8 comments:

traumador said...

i'm going to go on a limb and say art because your creating images and icons OF science. rather than the stuff that makes icons and images... (sort of a people version of the chicken and the egg i guess!)

that's my take, but what do i know? given my brain size and all.

Glendon Mellow said...

That makes sense. It would be interesting to hear what a fine artist would say, but I think I agree with you, Traumador.

Stephanie Zvan said...

Well, I put it under art, but that's largely because I don't think art is valued enough. So I'm pushing art whenever it's applicable.

Glendon Mellow said...

oooo, I like that reason, Stephanie!

Peter Bond said...

I have you under "Blogs I read." I'm a coward so I don't have to choose!

In fact, why don't we create a new category for science/art blogs:

"Sciart" .... or "Arence"....?

Thanks for the mention, Glendon!

Anonymous said...

I find that defaulting everything to art is a sustainable argument...

I have an old Peanuts cartoon that I had clipped half a century ago, and it shows Lucy standing beside Charlie Brown and his freshly made snowman, with her question to him ..."But is it ART?"

It just tickles my funny bone.

Glendon Mellow said...

Hey Bond!

The term sciart is used a bit. There's a sciart listserv run by the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators that I'm on. But I think it is more of an abbreviation than a term.

Glendon Mellow said...

Leslie, that reminds me of many of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. I think Watterson must have picked up on that Peanuts, as he is a fan.

My fave was Calvin insulting other kids' snowmen as being postmodern with nothing to say, or mere shock value, and declare his as genius.

I think Calvin's was a snowman broken apart on his parent's car in the driveway, with lots of shocked snowmen standing by.

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