A painting's "aura": repost

This was originally posted in October 2008. With over 600 posts on The Flying Trilobite now, I've been re-posting a few from time to time. Incidentally, the artwork featured here is available for purchase in a variety of card and print formats.

Reprinting today because originals versus prints has been on my mind again lately. Make sure to check the original post for the insightful comments there. 
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Today, I'd like to touch on how the artist feels about their own work, and its "aura", and how that differs for the Fine Artist versus the Illustrator. And no, I haven't lost my skeptical, rational mind.

The idea of a painting's aura is one I remember being presented without judgment by the prof in university. The concept has stayed with me.It's the notion that original paintings have an "aura" that emanates off the paint & canvas surface. Almost as though the original painting has a soul, or a living presence you sense when looking at it. It adds to their specialness. You have not truly experienced the painting until you've seen it in person. Our teachers tried to impart that this is mainly a macho, modernist idea.

In Fine Art, the modernist period was something fairly specific. To sum it up all too briefly, modernism in 

painting was "paintings with the subject matter of paint". You weren't painting a still-life of an apple: you were painting red paint. As an example, think of something by Rothko, or Pollock. Giant humongous canvases, covered usually in a couple of dominating colours. There was a lot of baggage that went along with this type of work, including that they should not ideally be viewed as reproductions.
Post-modernism in the fine art world, was (again, gross oversimplification) about deconstructing those modernist ideals of pure paint and pure sculpture, and of overthrowing the unique. A post-modern piece of art could contain both a painting and sculpture adjacent asone piece. Take that, modernist!
To look at one example, modernist Charles Demuth created the painting Figure Five in Gold, (1928). Classic Modernism, interplay of colour over a familiar, somewhat random symbol (5) we all know. It's distinct, and certainly was in '28.

Post-modern painter Robert Indiana created this painting,The Figure Five, (1963) as a way of overthrowing the originality of Demuth's Five. He disrupted the original by Demuth's claim to importance by making it one of many instead of unique. I see it as kind of a fine art world version of "screw you".


So paintings may have an aura you can only feel in the presence of the actual artwork, not a reproduction? Not likely. This smacks of vague New Age-y feelings-as-fact. I wondered about this idea for a long time. An exhibit, entitled 7 Florentine Heads came to the Art Gallery of Ontario, and I remember there was to be a Da Vinci drawing included. When I saw it, I anticipated the moment. I frickin' love Da Vinci, and his interest in science as well as hissfumato technique. I looked at each drawing in turn. Looked at one, read the placard, and saw it was his. I got an involuntary shiver down my back. Was it the aura?

Even back then in my proto-skeptical days, I knew there wasn't. I only felt it's "specialness" after reading who it was by. Looking only at the drawing, I saw another example of excellent work by a Renaissance artist. Context mattered to the aura, it seemed.Which brings me to addressing the photos of posters peppered throughout this post. Is one of the differences between an illustrator and a fine artist -at least, a modernist one- how they feel about a painting's uniqueness and supremacy of being the original? 

Recently, the artist (and good friend of mine) Christopher Zenga took his artwork online for the first time. And when discussing how the first couple of posts about his Zombears looked glowing off of the computer screen, Chris remarked to me, that he just sat back and stared at them; he was entranced by his own artwork reproduced in a different medium. 

Chris is right. I was elated for months looking at my paintings and drawings online, and knowing others might see something of value there. Do I have a fondness for the originals? Of course. Some are hanging in my living room. And yet there is an undeniable thrill to walk down the streets of Toronto and see a poster up with artwork I laboured over.
Starting with a discussion on the nature of art over at Laelaps, author of Renaissance Oaf Sean Craven has had a lot of excellent points about whether how to judge if a piece of artwork can be deemed "art".

I would put forth there is a difference between art created for the purpose of Illustration, and Fine Art, and a small part of that difference is in how the artist feels toward reproductions. The tingly feeling is enhanced when the image leaps forth to new media and many eyeballs.

The photos throughout this post were taken downtown at the University of Toronto campus, and are of my posterfor the October 2008 lecture by PZ Myers presented by the Centre for Inquiry Ontario. 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: Girl & Dino, made on iPod

Girl & Dinosaur, done on iPod Touch using Brushes.
©  Glendon Mellow

I've been messing with this drawing on my iPod off and on in odd moments. Used Brushes, which is so much better since it added layers.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
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Help me with my homework

This term, I'm taking a new studio course that looks gruelling in the best possible way. To start it off, we were paired with another student alphabetically, and we each separately need to come up with a favourite quote which will fire the trajectory of the term.

So, why not a poll, I thought immediately. But I gotta hurry. Poll closes Tuesday morning at 5:30 am.

Help! Please vote on the poll in the sidebar, and be a part of my art. You can pick multiple answers.

(This is the last class of my Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours degree. Can't wait. All those times I'll be at the opera, and the stage manager comes rushing out, "is there an artist in the house?!" and I'll coolly take out a ballpoint pen and perform emergency blow-painting with ink all over their backdrop.)

Here are the quotes I am nominating:

1) "-no frogs called, no insects sang, the tree branches stood silent, and no breath disturbed the motionless air."
-the last line of The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

2) "The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise."
-from Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters by Matt Ridley

3) "I no longer believe that the momentum of a life headed in a worthwhile direction ends when that life does."
-from Star Wars: X-Wing - Wraith Squadron by Aaron Allston

4) "Science is spectrum analysis. Art is photosynthesis."
-from Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half-Truths by Karl Krauss

5) "This may be because they are forest animals, and the leaf litter of forest floors is not friendly to fossils."
-from The Ancestor's Tale: a pilgrimage to the dawn of life by Richard Dawkins

6) "The strawberry was too old to remember anyone. By this time the hedgerows were filled with bones."
-from the poem, A Child's Garden of Strawberries, from Selected Strawberries and other poems by Susan Musgrave

Vote! Oh, and keep in mind we have been encouraged to draw and paint with unusual materials.


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Science Checkmate

Using my oil painting Science Accommodating Religion, I've been noodling around with the image.

This might look good on a t-shirt if I punch up the colours to a less painterly, more graphic cartoony look. Hmm. I saved the image with all the pieces in separate layers so I can move them around and resize them easily. Now that I look at it, perhaps the pieces should not be so evenly spaced.

Looking for opinions: how should I tweak it for a shirt in my repro shop?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Creative Spaces - Closet Creativity

Artist-writer-oaf Sean Craven of Renaissance Oaf and I have talked about how fascinating it is to peek inside another creative person's studio space. To quote Sean, "I'm always fascinated by the workspaces of creative types. The factories of the culture industry, the monastic hives of the culturally isolated, closets and couches as well as studios or arts centers."

Sean has started things off with Ascending the Lavender Staircase his Workstation and Decor by Default. So let's whisk into the wall of my living room.

My baseball-playing, special education teaching, gorgeous wife Michelle and I live in an ancient 3 story apartment just west of downtown where Littles Italy, Portugual and Brazil meet. It's a two-bedroom, and because our nephew stays over once a week, a few years ago we gave him the second bedroom as his own. Michelle's office moved to the living room. I offered to take one of our two huge living room closets. I didn't want the little guy messing with my painty chemicals.

So let's pull one book out on the shelf and whisk into the wall of my living room. My studio is a closet, painted to look like part of the wall. I don't have a lot of photos of the outside of the studio. Here's one from a couple of year's back. It's behind my holiday smile. Weird colours in that photo. The walls are actually more neutral blue-green.

This is just inside. You can see I have pieces of the Of Two Minds and Meming of Life banners tacked to the door. I also sometimes pour stand oil, a thick-as-honey heated linseed oil on top of my finished paintings, like the diatom fairy painting in the foreground. Gives it a mottled, glossy surface.

The view above my card table/drawing surface. Some pieces from the Migrations banner, and a large drawing about my asthma and lungs in general I did years ago.
Almost every surface of the studio is crammed with my images. I find it helps me to recall brushtrokes or colours I may presently be having trouble with. One of my only non-mybigego images is an article entitled "Evolution, and nothing more" by Jerry Coyne, published in Canada's National Post on Friday 2nd of December, 2005. It was a one page rebuttal to the previous day's insipid "intelligent design" article. It was the first time I had ever read Jerry Coyne, and it electrified me. I was drawing and talking about it like crazy. So now it's plaque-mounted and been in my studio space ever since.
Paintings, collapsible easel, buncha portfolios. Naked humans with mitochondria and trilobites.
They say the trick to taking pictures of oil paints is to use 2 bright bulbs at 45 degree angles or less and very distant from the painting. I paint in a closet. Meh.
My original painting-drawing for the current blog banner actually just moves awkwardly around the studio (below on my paint-box). The drawing is lined up on a piece of bristol that I carelessly got squidges of paint on. I really need to get that framed properly. Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle is under glass in a hinged 12x12 scrapbooking frame.

The wooden flying trilobite necklace Tanja Sova made and gave me is hanging below. Our home has books in almost every room. Like Bond, I like to have some inspiration and reference close at hand. The bright blue book below the awesome Art S. Buck mannequins and Precambrian toys is my mother's original nursing anatomy book. Books on concept art, atheism, science and art techniques all sit hand in hand on there. And Twisted Toyfare Theatre tends to creep in sometimes.
Paint! I use such thin layers when I paint, many of those tubes are from when I originally worked on my undergrad 12 years ago. I think I have only replaced the lamp black, titanium white and naples yellow. More storage portfolios, one with another diatom fairy from the period when all my people had green skin.
If studio spaces are like a room into the mind of the artist, mine is fit to burst. Or collapse inward and make a crushing singularity.
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This trip into Creative Spaces wouldn't be half as fun if it wasn't continued by others. Some Creative Spaces I'd love to see: Almost Diamonds, eTrilobite, The Day After, Heather Ward Wildlife Art, Claudia Massie and State of the Art. If you participate, feel free to use Sean's excellent logo above! We plan on collecting all the links in a post on Art Evolved.
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Other Creative Spaces so far:
*Renaissance Oaf, Parts one, two, three.
*Bond's Blog

- - - - - - - - Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence. Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Subway trilobite with Brushes app

Still practicing with the Brushes app on my iPod Touch. Did this while on the streetcar and subway yesterday. I kind of like the sketchy pencil lines. Trying to keep my practice pieces simple. Limited colour palette, subject I'm familiar with and a dark background. I think that's always best when exploring a new medium.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence. Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Looking Ahead: Glimpses of Artwork for 2008

As promised in my last post, here are some closely cropped details and sketches of art pieces I've been working on. This will see the flickering pixels of day some time in 2008. The first one is complete, and will make a splashy debut within the week.

No links - these aren't online anywhere else yet. The images may be a little washed-out and blurry since I won't subject them to a healthy Photoshop exfoliating until they are finished gestating.














One of these will be The Flying Trilobite's new banner for 2008.

Glendon Mellow featured on The Eloquent Atheist

The Eloquent Atheist, an online atheist & humanist magazine, has featured one of my paintings, Symbiosis.

This is the first entry by a visual artist on The Eloquent Atheist, and naturally (not supernaturally) I am very excited to be a part of it! From The Eloquent Atheist:

"Our intent is to expose people to the positive aspects of Atheism and
Humanism through various types of the written arts..."

I do consider myself to be a Bright , a term coined a few years ago for one who believes in a natural universe. It is an umbrella term, or at least it seeks to be for people who variably describe themselves as atheists, humanists, rationalists, Darwinists, skeptics and freethinkers. Some find the "Bright" name unappealing, and worry it is too arrogant or silly. A proposed term (I believe by Daniel Dennett) for people who believe in the supernatural, is "Supers". I have chronicled my growth out of agnostic-pagan thought before, and I like the Bright label. Hard to say you're a Darwinist when you are talking about astronomy or quantum mechanics, since evolution by natural selection doesn't enter into it.

Just to be all linky about it, the article is here.

A bio about me is on The Eloquent Atheist here.

My original post about the painting Symbiosis is here.

I also posted a sketch I did of the painting here.

There are a lot of great articles and pieces of poetry on The Eloquent Atheist. A special piece by Harvey H. Madison called Cosmic Connection struck a chord with me, it is secular numinism, if I may say such a contradiction in terms. As well, Michael W. Jones' short story, Night Sky is a thoughtful portrayal of realising which universe we really live in. Fans of astronomy should check these out.

Thanks to Michael W. Jones and Marilyn Westfall at The Eloquent Atheist for creating a great magazine, and for showcasing my artwork.

Trilobite's out of the bag

I've made a couple of vague statements about being hard at work on something in my last couple of posts. Well, for fans of ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts over at Retrospectacle: a neuroscience blog, they know what it is. She made the announcement here.

Shelley approached me about making a new banner for her blog, so she could have a few to rotate through. The other new one is already up, a beautiful and sleek piece by professional scientific illustrator Carl Buell. It's the banner with the shell and African Grey parrot. Be sure to check out his detailed and fascinating work at Olduvai George!

My banner is almost done and ready, and I'll be sure to post a link when it's up.

I started this blog to promote my artwork; I have been exceedingly pleased with the people I have met online, and what a rich community there is out there for artists and scientists. And I thank Shelley Batts for the opportunity.

Richard Dawkins Portrait Revisited

Back in June (has it been that long?) , I began a portrait of one of the sources of my artistic inspiration as an adult, Richard Dawkins.

I did not pick Prof. Dawkins because of The God Delusion, although I do think that is a tremendously important and well-written book. I picked Richard Dawkins mainly because of River Out of Eden, The Ancestor's Tale, and Unweaving the Rainbow.

River Out of Eden, as I've mentioned before, was the first book by Dawkins that I read. I was struck by how intelligently the armchair logic strung together, and how much sense it all made. The world could make sense, with the right mindset and tools to investigate. Even the mistakes along the way could be valuable. It is a beautifully written book, and there is more of the sublime in wondering about 'Mitochondrial Eve' than the Biblical Eve, in my opinion. It's a short but nourishing read, and if you are wondering about Dawkins' "voice" in his books and are feeling trepidation about The God Delusion, start here, and you will quickly find that there is nothing 'shrill' or 'strident' about his writing.

Back to the portrait. It has stalled somewhat for me at the moment. A while ago, I reported that is was in its Ugly Phase, which most of my paintings go through. I was trying out a new material to draw and paint on, and I am not happy with the result. Oil paints sometimes suffer from what is known as "sinking", when they absorb into the surface enough that the normally glossy oil becomes dull in some places, giving it a patchy look. There are retouching varnishes on the market that can fix this problem, but I feel I may have to abandon that painting and print out another copy of the drawing above to carry on from.

After reading an article in Art Scene International, featuring the stellar Donato Giancola, I tried a few tips. Drew out the portrait as you see above, and then painted a clear gesso primer over top so that if I felt it was not going well, or I accidentally gave Richard Dawkins a huge handlebar moustache, I could use a small bit of solvent and scrape back the painting to see the original drawing underneath.

Scraping it back to the see the drawing underneath didn't really work. *sigh*

So, at least I have the scan. I am currently working on another piece that is occupying a lot of my attention (I'll be sure to crow about it if it works out), and I am trying something new. I drew the piece out on my favourite Strathmore Bristol vellum finish, scanned it, and printed the piece (with heightened contrast) onto canvasette paper (aka canvas paper). Now if I mess it up, the drawing still exists. Much better.

Richard Dawkins' books on evolution contain so much beauty and wonder in them that I know I will attempt this portrait again very soon. Besides, there are other scientists and sources of inspiration I'd like to paint as my own little egotistical tributes. Hmm, I can already think of a diptych companion to Dawkins...perhaps Sagan...

Fun with Trilobites!

Here are some of the more bizarre trilobite links I've come across the last few months while presenting my artowork on this blog.

Trilobites fluttering everywhere...
With over 6 billion people on the planet, you'd think I'd know that no idea is probably completely original any more. But I was still shocked (and later delighted) to see another site featuring trilobites with wings. The award-winning online comic Girl Genius by Phil & Kaja Foglio has just that, in the form of the Heterodyne logo. I suppose the juxtaposition is what is entrancing about the idea of a trilobite with wings. I've developed it after seeing the extended pleura halfway down the body of some trilobite families. What Girl Genius does is evoke an Eqyptian scarab. The comic has many avid fans, one of who alerted me to the similarity, (thanks Luna_the_Cat!) The comic is delightful and the artwork just brilliant.

For more inspired trilobite artwork, check out the alluring images by Jacqueline Rae on deviantArt.

Trilobite Cookies!
Aww, look at the cute little baby trilo- >bite!<

Look! Up in the sky!

The very cool work of Peter Lynn. Trilobite kites!

Trilobite molecules. Over 15 000 species wasn't enough, now they're invading physics. Run while you can!

Apparently, there is also a band...

You can never miss the best resource page online, by Sam Gon III, A Guide to the Order of Trilobites. There's even a pin-up once a month. Shake that pygidium! There's even a page about trilobite imposters, like those pesky isopods that fool so many people.

Three very cool words put together:
Robot. Trilobite. Vacuum. by Electrolux! I want one. Or two, they could mate and the robot uprising could start to evolve.

Has The Flying Trilobite missed anything else truly strange and wondrous? Please post a link!

Now I'm off to Calgary and the Alberta badlands for a week! I'll have lots of blogable material and hopefully some new drawings.

Ugly Phase

Most of my paintings go through the Ugly Phase. I have to dive right in and push that oil paint until I start to become satisfied with it. Right now I can't bear to look at it without correcting every little thing.

When I can't stop looking at it without finding more to do, that's when I start to enjoy the process of painting. The end result of a piece thrills me when I feel it has come out well. The process of getting there is more a wracking exercise in frustration.

At this point, I feel Lim Leng Hiong of Fresh Brainz is right; Professor Dawkins looks somewhat stern in my rendition. I think I'll go with it. Combatting irrational creationists is a stern business.

A Peek at my Dawkins Portrait

Just a tiny peek.

This is a portrait I am doing of Richard Dawkins. Much of my work for many years has been inspired by his science writing, particularly River Out of Eden. I hope to have the finished work completed soon. (Soon being a loose and playful term.) It is an unauthorised tribute.

I welcome comments.

"Painting is the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critics."
-Ambrose Bierce

Tagged!

The Flying Trilobite has been tagged by the tentacled terror of Pharyngula, PZ Myers! After his tremendous entry, I am asked to do likewise. Forgive the lack of images in this post. Here are the rules. Tag was not this complicated when I was eight >grumble<

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

One: Pansy
I have a memory, possibly a false one from age 5.
There was a strip of grass parallel to the road in our neighbourhood, between sidewalk and road. There were saplings planted there, with some pansies. I wasn’t allowed that close to the road, and in a childish moment of defiance I went. I remember plucking a pansy, a deep purple one shot through with black, with a yellow center, and getting in trouble for “killing the flower”. To my mother, the greater crime was being near the road.
I snuck back down. I remember using a leaf and grass and propping up the snapped flower stem, and trying to squish them together to fix it. Guilt and frustration were strong emotions.
Later, I remember being excited because the two parts of the stem had grown back together! There was even a paler green part of the stem, like fresh skin from under a scab. I remember this quite clearly. Is it a false memory conjured by childish guilt when recalling the incident years later? My knowledge of botany and gardening is limited. Did I graft it somehow, making a Frankenpansy?

Two: Transform
I know the moment my childhood ended. At a cottage with my childhood best friend, we were playing with our Transformers. We planned out the whole storyline for our Autobots and Decepticons, right down to the plot twists and Starscream’s treacherous dialogue. We said, right, let’s get to it, and had absolutely no interest in acting it out. Making up the story was more interesting than playing. We both noticed it, and tiredly wondered if we were getting too old. I think I was about 11.

Three: Coffee
Coffee is my life’s blood, my passion, my exalted connection to nature. I love all of it, from the seedy, filthy badness of left-too-long Coffee Time, to the blended-layer flavours of a Le Gourmand americano or Mercury Espresso latte. I feel its hotness go into my belly and I am one with the bean, the oxygen its leaves produced and the loosening of my asthmatic lungs, the earth under my feet and between its roots.

Four: Ring
I have a trilobite set in a ring, given to me by my wife Michelle. It’s an Elrathia kingi. I really feel what I said in my first post; I look at this ancient fossil, and marvel that I can comprehend something so long deceased. It leaves me with a shaking sense of awe. I wear it rarely now, since after 300 million years, it is eroding from my touch.

Five: Performance
My university roommates were a dancer and an actor. A couple of close friends are in increasingly successful bands. I remember remarking to a friend & fellow painter that I wish the artists’ equivalent called for standing ovations, or people jumping up and down and moshing; and lamenting that gallery openings can be too quiet with respect to the actual work. She said to me, “But our art stays. Even if they film it, it’s not the same, and they can’t just look at their work the way we can.” Paintings never stop performing, even when you turn out the lights.

Six: Everything
I desperately want to live a million years and see everything that happens. The rises and falls of humanity, new species, cataclysms, discoveries. My five year old nephew says it best: “I want to know everything in the whole world so I can do whatever I want”. Yes. Exactly.

Seven: Trivial
A couple of hours after the planes crashed and towers fell on 9/11, I had to go to my job at an art supply store. I remember a woman yelling at me that afternoon because we had run out of a particular shade of grey pastel paper. I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t know what to say. Later, I felt pity. She either knew what had transpired south of us and was venting displaced fear and panic, or she had somehow not heard, and would feel some remorse later at her outburst on something so trivial as paper. The tragedy of that day has served as a strong mental reinforcer of the trivial and normally forgettable memory of the exact colour of a paper: felt grey.

Eight: Ugly
My paintings all go through what I call their Ugly Phase, when I hate them and question myself. I use an older technique of layering my oil paintings, gradually refining the detail and blending. I am not as hardcore as the Renaissance masters, I only do maybe three or four, not fifteen. I wait for them to dry before moving to the next layer.
When I was at York University, and completing a painting with a lot of up-close, fibrous acorns hatching hands out of them, our teaching assistant stopped me after I completed the central one. He kept insisting I leave the brown cartoon outlines of the acorns in the background untouched. This, he said as if explaining something new to me, would play with the space, and reveal the juxtaposition of the realistic foreground to the flat background. I patiently replied that yes, I understood the Modernist concept of painting the subject of paint, and I understood the post-Modern concept of showing realism while revealing, Oz-like, the flat paint behind the curtain. I cited examples of artists. I wanted them to be realistic; he insisted. By third year I gave up trying to please the post-Modernists.

Comments on anything above are most welcome. And now for this chain-meme-game to continue, red rover, red rover, I pick...

Fish Feet
Fancy's Art
Frozen Toothpaste
Jesse Graham's Art
Planet Atheism Blog
Diatomaceous Earth
Scientia Natura
The Red Notebook

And please check back at the great stuff the other folks PZ Myers tagged the same time as The Flying Trilobite.

Knowledge Pupates Part 3: how I left paganism for science

Part 3
(Read Part 2 here about my reasonable University days.)
(Read Part 1 here about my pagan-ish High School days.)

Back in my coffee-slinging days, a co-worker of mine pointed out how some customers never change their style. You know the type; they are stuck in the seventies, tucked-in plaid shirt & jeans, kind of shoulder-length hair that's not long enough to be committed to being long hair. Or they are stuck in a sixties-hippie earth-mother look, lots of swinging beads and mismatched patterns on layered clothing. You observe them with a fashion-forward eye, and think, "if they just tweaked it, it could be very retro-cool". But fashion is passing them by, and they are content, or at least oblivious.

The painting at left is kind of like that for me. I hadn't finished developing a look, and maybe it was over before I began this painting. I was still elated by the final product of Symbiosis that I kept painting these figures in sap green and naples yellow. This painting resides inside an antique black box with wire wrapped around it through the lid to evoke threads and wrapping.

I have blogged briefly in the other two parts of Knowledge Pupates about how I began to find reason & science more appealing than superstition and old fairy tales. And my thoughts continue to develop. I don't want my learning to stop, I want to keep learning throughout my life, and right now, I hope I always feel that way. One can no longer contain the sum of all human knowledge in a lifetime; we have access to so much information, the mind reels. I wish I could live a thousand years, a million years just to keep learning, and to see how humanity develops, how I would develop. Instead, I am content with my lifetime and its abundant opportunities to develop myself.

My fashion continues to evolve, from hip-hop lite teen, to gothy university days, to a general darker aesthetic now. My art feels different now, still dark, but maybe a little less cluttered. And my beliefs have altered, and I have sought out different positions to sort out how I feel. 9/11 changed things for a lot of people. I can remember the confusion it caused. A few years later, I read Richard Dawkins essay, Time to Stand Up in A Devil's Chaplain and I was amazed at the strength of his statements. They cut right to the heart of the harm irrational religious thinking can do.

And religious thinking worries me. I plan to have kids, and there are children I care about in my family, and I want them to continue to be little questioning machines their whole lives, always asking "why? why?" after each statement. Religious thinking can carry on with the "why"'s for a bit, and then it comes down to trusting "God said so" or having faith that irrational ideas will work out in the end. In sci-fi authour Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Green Mars of the Mars Trilogy there is a classroom scene where the kids play a game to have their science teacher keep regressing into finer and finer explanations by asking "why?" until the game comes to a triumphant end: the teacher stammers and replies "we don't know", to the childrens' delight. In this time and place in the universe, I can think of no greater purpose for humanity than to continue to ask questions.

I started this blog with the intention of showing my artwork, self-promoting, and generally giving myself a weekly challenge. I don't want to stop looking at the bagginess or fitted-ness of men's pants each season, and I don't want my art to play out the same couple of techniques and images over and over. I don't want to stop developing my opinions on the politics and religions of the world, because although themes re-occur, the situations are still developing.

I think I have painted enough creepy green people for now.

Page 3.14 profiles The Flying Trilobite

Page 3.14, the online editorial page of ScienceBlogs.com & Seed magazine, has an interview with me about my artwork and blog today!

Thanks to Virginia Hughes for taking the time!

Please check out this link, and keep your eye on the ever-changing content of ScienceBlogs.com. Their finger's on the pulse.

Mythical Flying Trilobite, oil paint on shale, 2007. Copyright Glendon Mellow.

Ammonite Vs Trilobite

Recently, PZ Myers who runs the popular science blog Pharyngula ran a call for new entries to his popular blogroll. The Flying Trilobite is now one of Prof. Myers' multitude. (or at least will be soon....so far the new entries have not yet been added to the roll itself...see the announcement here.)

I thought it was fitting then, to display this painting I did last year of an ammonite attacking a trilobite. Y'see, Prof. Myers has this affinity with cephalopods...

This work is an oil on canvas, and hangs with a group of my pieces, including My Life With Trilobites. Quniacradone orange is one of my favourite earthy tones.

You might be thinking, "poor, cute li'l trilobite". The trilobite stepped on the ammonite's shell, and kinda scuffed it. The ammonite then snapped the trilobite's shell in half. "A shell for a shell", is the kind of prehistoric, savage morals these ancient creatures lived by. I'm so glad we are past that kind of thinking on this planet.

You may now roll your eyes.

Symbiosis

Symbiosis contains many of my favourite themes. The candles have DNA wicks, as a symbol I often use of mortality. The tardigrade, or "water-bear" is a lowly (read: small) organism we share puddles of water with. I was especially pleased when at a university exhibit, a zoologist friend recognised I painted a tardigrade right off. The distended belly (full of bacteria, of course) and the atmosphere suggests ( I intended) one of shared mortality.

I have a deep appreciation for the genius painters of the Renaissance. My feelings are best summed up in this paragraph of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

"If history had worked out differently, and Michaelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn't he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven's Mesozoic Symphony, or Mozart's opera The Expanding Universe....what if....Shakespeare had been obliged to work to commissions from the Church? We'd surely have lost Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth."

(from The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, p 86-87, Houghton Mifflen Co. 2006. Reprinted without permission but with the deepest respect. )

The world as revealed by the scientific method contains so many wonders. There is so little time to paint. To the linseed oil!

Disease

This piece was done in oil on canvasette paper. It's called Disease and I originally did this as a cd cover. (Unfortunetly it never saw publication, but them's the breaks.)

It's about memes that prey on the mind, for good or ill.

My Life With Trilobites

So I did it. I finally decided to register as a Bright.

I was up late and looking at www.the-brights.net and the different comments by people who joined, and I decided I would too. I was happily surprised to see an entire section for people who join somewhat reluctantly.

The idea of declaring yourself as a Bright is that you are saying you believe in a natural (not supernatural) worldview. That's it. That's all I'm saying.

All the other possible baggage (being

a skeptic, atheist, agnostic, Darwinist etc.) fits under the umbrella term "A Bright".

Some people think the term "I'm a Bright" sounds arrogant. I see their point. But come on, saying "I'm a Bright" is not really the same as declaring "I'm a Super-Genius". That would be arrogant.

I guess I wanted to register as a Bright also to be for something, rather than announcing myself as excluding something. Saying "I'm an atheist" is kind of loaded, like declaring verbal war on another person's beliefs, because it's all about the disagreement. Being a Skeptic is kind of the same thing, because of the cynical overtones most people associate with it, (despite Skeptic magazine's definition as an embodiment of the scientific method). And saying I'm a neo-Darwinist doesn't help when discussing gluons or pulsars.

So I'm a Bright. Hopefully it's a bit more of a conversation starter at dinner parties than gluons and pulsars.