Art Tuesday: group effort

A while ago, I asked Flying Trilobite readers for help choosing a quote for a school project. The winner was from Matt Ridley's, Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters.

"The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise."

In class, we were partnered with another student based on our names in alphabetical order. Luckily, I was paired with Michelle Kim, another representational artist. Her quote had to do with life being like a spiral. Here's some pics of the end result.


Detail 1: Detail 2:

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**My apologies for missing Art Monday! I was too sick to post.

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

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.
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Art Monday: Fossil Boy, Diatom Girl

Our final project for my Drawing & Narrative class was more or less open. I decided to continue exploring ammonite fossils, hands, and some diatoms.

For a long time, I've used diatoms along with images of my wife, Michelle. Diatoms are beautiful algae that create complicated geometric structures from silica, and look like beautiful glass ornaments. They help create oxygen, which is a nice thing for an asthmatic like me to associate with my wife in a metaphorical life-sustaining way. The fossils are kind of a proxy for me. Part of the suggested outline for the assignment included making a book, and images of family.

Three of the most difficult things to draw are the face, hands, and feet. (Foreshortening is a whole other problem.) I love drawing hands, so I looked at this as a challenge. I decided I would add some torn paper elements as well. While working on my rough sketches, our professor suggested including some elements with the Fibonacci sequence, and looking up artists Mario Merz. I've done some sketches using Fibonacci numbers before, when I was working on Dan Rhoads' Migrations blog banner. I tried to use it as a compositional device.

Almost in its entirety, (a snippet is lopped off from the edges), here are the drawings from the series Fossil Boy, Diatom Girl.


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Interview at Extreme Biology

An interview with yours truly, conducted by Melina of the Extreme Biology blog has gone up. Extreme Biology is a high school biology class blog run by Miss Baker. who teaches in the North Eastern U.S. The students will also be attending the upcoming Science Online 2010 in January, and I hope to shake hands with the interviewer!
I dunno though. Sometimes I wonder if listening to an artist is like listening to one of those Eighties hair-metal bands talk about their music. Hopefully I made more sense.
(Thanks Melina and Miss Baker!)
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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The “that’s right people, I’m an artist, but I do science-y art and it’s cool” badge.

Aww, thanks Jason! (see below)

Art Monday: Anthropometry

Anthropometry

Close up of left side: Close up of right side:Click each to enlarge.

The text on the right hand glove says:

"It follows also, that no vain or selfish person can possibly paint, in the noble sense of the word."
-from Modern Painters by John Ruskin Vol.5, E.P. Dutton & Co. (no date on colophon) .

"When the pupils can make from the figure rapid pencil sketches showing good action and good proportion, they may be allowed to indicate the features in a very simple way. "
-from the Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Art, Toronto, William Briggs, 1916, 1918 edition.

The assignment was to discuss sexuality, body image, eroticism, beauty or any combination of these. I decided to go for body image and perfection from a different angle. Anthropometry seemed appropriate.

After some discussion with Felice Frankel about our upcoming ScienceOnline2010 session, my mind has been ticking about the way scientific visualizations and scientific illustrations create their own standards, holotypes and "perfect" images, as well as how artists have done the same. From da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, to laws of the body being 7.5 heads high (or whatever), artists have been using these semi-arbitrary rules for perfect drawing for as long as there has been clay and fingers to smudge it with.

India Ink, pencil, and sanguine brush marker drawing on hygienic latex gloves. Glued to stretcher bars and backlit. Copyright Glendon Mellow 2009.

Some of the rough work can be seen here.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Some sketchy sketches

Here's a few things I've been working on.

Sketches for my class. The topic is body image. Pop culture and sexuality is popular as a topic, but I thought I'd tackle anthropometry and perfect proportions for the artist. Lots of nodding at Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man here.

With how my lungs have been feeling lately, I thought I'd revisit my Asthma Incubus drawing from a few years back, and dive into ArtRage a bit more. This is not even close to done: the figure is on a separate layer so I can delete it after I paint them in properly.

There's also a new Steampunk Trilocopter on the way, with larger, Opipeuterella-ian eyes for the cockpit.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: Seed Fossil Flax Flower

A detail view of one of the underlying drawings from my project, Sowing Seeds & Fossils.


The text written on drafting film in the image below says,

a. Nutrient- rich shell yields dark oil when pressed.
b. Flowers have ammolite-sheen on stalks, esp. at base.
c. Pleasing to my eye. I hope transfer works onto pumice.
d. Observed to crawl blindly up the sides of buildings to eavestroughs.

You can see the project and all it's layers here.


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: peek at my Jane Goodall portrait

This drawing is actually larger than my scanner. (Click to enlarge) It's part of the series I am tentatively calling Lights. You can see a photo of J. Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins at this post.

I am trying to tie-in a source of light on each scientist's head, and some sort of double helix shape in the backgrounds. For my second drawing project at York University.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

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Quick glance: Venter & Dawkins

A quick glance at two of the (hopefully) six portraits I'm doing for my drawing class at York U.

Left, J. Craig Venter, right, Richard Dawkins. Click-y to enlarge-y.
I'm thinking about calling the series, "Lights". I'm planning next to do Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, Eugenie Scott and mmmmaaaybe, Carl Sagan.

Quality is somewhat sacrificed for time, but I suppose they're passable.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: Sowing seeds and fossils

This is a multi-media drawing project about York University's landscape. Once, southern Ontario was underwater. Many marine fossils can be found here, such as ammonites. More recently, the land was used for farming. Here, I am showing flax, a favourite of mine due to its use in oil painting.

This is Sowing seeds and fossils.
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It is constructed out of beechwood panels,
a piece of shale, various pumice mediums,
with acrylic matte medium transfers of the drawings,
chalk pastel, graphite and charcoal,
mylar and india ink,
.3mm mechanical pencil with HB lead on vellum-finish bristol,
with notes from scientific documents,
and notes from my sketchbook.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: 1st school assignment so far

Here's what I've been working on so far for school.

Our drawing studio class has a simple structure. 1st class,presentation of the assignment. 2nd class, present progress so far and work on it. 3rd class, class and instructor critique. That's tomorrow, and the final is much further along than you can see here.
Hand sowing flax seeds and fossils.

We are to do a drawing about the York U landscape. Our professor has an evident love for nature (he came to the first class with a list from the environmental studies program of every catalogued species found on campus), and so I got to thinking about York's deeper history. Like much of Southern Ontario, marine fossils can be found. Or would be. Most of York's campus was once farmland, and any larger sized rocks are gone from the soil. The rest is landfill. There's no rocky outcroppings anywhere.Ammonite shell sprouting flax flowers (incomplete).

So I have also done a shale drawing of an ammonite. I'll show that with the final next week.

My project has also gone in an unexpected direction after last week's group discussion about works in progress. I'll find out tomorrow if I'm pushing it too far from the literal I had started with.Flax seed sprouting cephalopod.


The final is being matte medium transferred onto beechwood supports, and over-layed with mylar containing notations. I've also layered a couple of the wood supports with pumice stone medium to give it a rocky feel.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: steampunk trilocopter sketch

My last day before returning to school tomorrow. Had a bit of time to monkey around some more with ArtRage and I loooooovvvve it. For the first time in my life I have a new computer; triple-core, 4MB ram, 750MB hard drive and magic elves. I know this may sound ridiculously provincial, but the screen is awesome. And it takes my digital tablet strokes beautifully.

I used my Intuos 3 tablet to sketch out this rough idea in the amazing ArtRage. I cannot recommend this digital painting program enough. The interface is so close to using real paint & pencil (but with an undo key!) it's stunningly elegant for a greasy oil painter like myself to use.

Steampunk flying trilobites: I've had this idea kicking around since my first year online, and I figure with the technology upgrade in my art I might as well give the little critters an upgraded mode of flying. The big one in the middle is a dirigible (I love that word.)

Here's the first one, sketched to simulate pencil. This is a digital sketch, not something I scanned. Obviously I'm happy with the software simulation of graphite.Here's a duplicate, transformed and re-worked, this time adding some digital paint to it. Again, this is just me goofing around.Tomorrow I'm back at York U, and this term I'm taking Drawing & Narrative. Seemed like a wise thing to take in this portion of my semi-illustrator career.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Transitions

Computer Transitions
Immediately after logging out of Blogger on last week's Art Monday, our Compaq Presario R3000 with the busted screen froze and restarted with an error we may not be able to fix. Thanks to a couple of helpful bloggers, (Thanks ScottE and Lousy Canuck!) I may be able to rescue the family photos we were still in the process of backing up. My artwork is relatively safe on an external hard drive and USB key and my iPod Touch. Back-up your files, kids!

At the moment, I'm working from a loaner pc my wife's mom lent us: Thanks bunches, S! I was hoping to budget a new inexpensive pc for my return to my undergrad this September. Innumerable people have suggested I invest in a Mac, but I'm not sure that's in the budgetary cards right now. At any rate, even an inexpensive Acer or equivalent will seem like a dream after what I've been using since starting The Flying Trilobite.

Our laptop had a number of problems. We bought it lovingly used from a friend and it was great. After one cold night walk outside to a friend's place, the top right of the screen lost half of its pixels. You could kind of bend it and they'd snap back on for a few seconds. A few months ago, our old Photoshop CS stopped working, due to the software licence number not being registered - I was sure the copy we purchased with the laptop was legit, but at any rate, the operator's recommendation was to sink $700 into Photoshop CS4. I'd love to. For the moment though, I downloaded GIMP free software, and I have been eyeing Artrage for the new computer when we get it. My Wacom Intuos 3 came with some nifty software I'll load onto it as well.

And that's something important that needs to be said to all the aspiring artists who might read this, or colleagues who fall on hard times. Your tools only carry you so far. If you think the art I produce has any degree of technical ability at all, keep in mind I've been using a 5+ year old laptop with a busted screen that takes 15 minutes to log onto DSL connected internet. I'll say it again: your tools only carry you so far. The rest is practice practice practice. Do what you are good at. Expand your skill set by experimenting a bit at a time, pace yourself at integrating new lessons.

School Transitions
I'm a student again. This is a weird feeling, but in a few weeks I'll be headed back to York University to complete an undergrad I left incomplete about 12 years ago. My wife and I met shortly after I left school, so she doesn't know what I'm like as a single-minded obsessed art student. Oh dear.

It seems like a fool's hope that I will go beyond the undergrad, what with working, food near a table, roof in the vicinity of heads etc., but I admit I've begun to think about it. What I'd really love to do is illustrate full-time. I think my personal life is gonna be busy this year.

Blog+Art Transitions
I think this blog is slowly expanding into some new areas beyond the art. I'm commenting more on the nature of being an atheist today, and being a tad more personal.

Art-wise, expect to see some new themes as well. It'll always be Art in Awe of Science, I'm simply adding more things to the mix. I aim to do some pop-nerd culture drawings for the August Art Mondays. 'Cuz why not?

I have loads of artwork I'd like to wrap up in this month before school starts, and I've bought my supplies (except that pesky new computer). Always willing to let a contract interrupt though! I promised myself I'd stop announcing artwork I haven't completed but here's a list of things on my slate to be checked off when I can. (There, that's nice and vague.)

-New Diatom Fairy piece. Sketch here and at right. Diatom Fairies are basically my wife Michelle who doesn't like looking at herself in paintings. Which is weird because she's gorgeous.
-My submission to the Coyne/Benson/Myers/Haubrich/etc accommodationist-Vs-atheist in science debate. Almost done. Involves science-chess pieces.
-Three new t-shirt ideas. Camouflage flying trilobite insignia, albino squirrel doing tai-chi, and a butterfly-winged trilobite. These'll probably have to wait until I'm settled into a new computer.
-A mysterious planned image for The Beagle Project. Got the wood panel ready, and prelim drawings done.
-A number of Lord of the Rings drawings, Marvel comic characters and a new image of my Trilobot Transformer to complete for the next few art Mondays.

You know when you have that feeling? Like, where will I be in one year's time? Everything feels in flux right now, and in a good way. Even with the toasted-'puter.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: remembering my first time

I'll never forget the first time I felt my artwork had reached 'professional' quality.



Every piece of artwork on this blog was created after this one drawing. It is the second page of a narrative assignment done in my first year of Fine Arts at university. The series is called The Three Fates and the Acorns, and it consisted of 10 drawings in total. This was page 2, but the first part I had completed and I felt I had created something special.

I had been using .3mm leads since high school, and still had many unformed opinions about mythology, religion and folklore. I was using acorns as a motif that year, both to symbolize nascent wisdom and to represent birth. In the series, each of the three fates (Norse, Roman or Greek, I didn't specify) was dying due to acorns. The one above is drowning because a tiny cluster of acorns is tied to her toe. Fate defeated by wisdom.

Mainly I was really happy with the tightness and quality of my cross-hatching, and the minimal style of disconnected pieces of sinewy bodies.

On critique day, I was initially disheartened as our professor made his way around to see the work before group crit started. He said he didn't get it, it didn't flow, and it was up to me if I wanted to show it to the group. I insisted I should.

In group crit, I went through each piece. Some "ooo"'s, some comments about the line work. A couple of people agreed the deaths depicted in the series were misogynistic. I was taken aback by the accusation. Misogynistic! It had never entered my mind. (Some would say that's the problem, I suppose.)

The professor replied before I could. He had done a complete about-face on the series due to my presentation. He loved it! He began to vigorously defend it as decidedly not misogynistic and said that was overly dismissive, or some such. He marveled to the group that he had not "gotten it" when I showed it to him before crit.

After class, one of my female classmates stopped me to tell me that it was the most beautiful series of the year. A couple of others with her agreed. I left class with a huge rush at the overall responses. To this day though, I worry myself with possible misinterpretations of my art, particularly because so much is secular and science-based.

Sometimes I wonder. How much of the positive response was from my brief explanation, and how much from the images? Does it make the images less potent if they must be explained?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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I'm a student again.

I am officially returning to York University to complete my Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in September.

In 1997, my fourth year of my undergrad, life had some upheaval. A bad break-up. My parents, split since I was 8 years old, decided to finally divorce and sell the house, leaving me paying rent. YorkU had one of its now-infamous strikes, which lasted about seven weeks and went to the end of the school year. I remember after classes were over, we were asked to "meet the professors" in the common area outside. 40 000 students milling about looking for hundreds of professors in a rabble.

One course teacher was on loan from another institution, and a number of us couldn't find her. A huge portion of our mark rested on the final studio assignment. We dropped the course, not knowing what else to do. I left, missing a 3rd year studio course.

I tried to go back the following fall and take a computer painting class, but the gruel of paying my bills, rent and student loans was killing me, and I dropped it. I spent months eating plain pasta with soy sauce and leftover low-fat muffins from my coffee shop job. I biked over an hour to get to that job, and was built like a rock. My family never had much money, and the idea of finishing my degree drifted away.

I'm proud of some of my choices. I've helped my wife get through her education and she is now a certified teacher with a specialty working with children with special needs, mainly in the autism spectrum. I have a good day-job at a company that treats people well, and I'm proud of my work there.

But the unfinished degree has always rankled. Like part of my life has been on hold. And I always enjoyed school, got good marks and felt like I applied much of what I learned. Studio courses at York require such a high time commitment you may only take 2 each school year. Hopefully, in one more calendar year, I will have my BFA and be annoying and put it after my name everywhere. "The Flying GlendonMellowBFA Trilobite Blog".

I enrolled about 30 minutes ago. I'm scheduled for a half course in Drawing and Narrative, and another in Painting 2-d & 3-d. Already a weight is cast off my shoulders.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite
Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
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Artwork Mondays: referencing, gazing and Mitochondrial Eve

This week, I've been thinking a lot about social-consciousness in art. Y'know, being political and having a message for the public sphere.

There's some reasons for my preoccupation.

Tyler Handley at The Edger wondered how to classify atheist art. Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera shows the tension between illustration/photojournalism and fine art, and how poorly played it can both enhance and upset a career. Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock has an interesting round-up of articles about art about science; I'm struck by how many are about global warming, but not surprised.

Social activism and controversies are always a part of the fine artists' agenda. It's not surprising. And it's a good thing the global warming crisis is a part of the agenda! I remember in university about 10 years ago, some wag put up a list of "10 images to be an art hack" too high up on a support pillar to take down. On it were things like, "Coca-Cola logo" (to signify evil corporations), "Kate Moss" (to signify male-controlled body image), "fetus" (to signify the abortion debate).

My friends and I used the term, "shake and bake" for this type of art; by putting an image on canvas of say, Kate Moss you were automatically addressing bulimia, women's body image, the perpetuation of the male-gaze in art, heroin chic (Trainspotting was a big movie when I was in Uni) and being "ironic" and "conflicted" by both showing her and "referencing" her. Ooo, edgy, a half-naked painting of a photo of Kate Moss.

Referencing was a big buzz word in Fine Art back then. It meant copying something, or including it in there. It was supposed to be a dialogue, while perhaps being vague on what you were saying.

It meant you didn't have to come up or reveal a new conflict to the viewer, you simply added to the dialogue. Shale and bake. Truly new conflicts were hard to smash through with. In my own small way, I tried. After reading River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins over and over, I tried numerous pieces about the Mitochondrial Eve concept. It enthralled me that we could figure out things like this bottleneck in our prehistory. But it wasn't new of the day, so it was hard to spread the wonderment. Frustrating.

Here is that painting, Mitochondrial Eve:

Not perhaps my strongest work back then, and I've almost painted over it a few times. This one was painted on an antique wood panel to prevent warping, using traditional materials (rabbit-skin glue....eewwww) so it will likely look at me with it's not-up-to-my-standards look for quite some time.

I had roommates also in the Fine Arts, one majoring in dance, one in theatre. We'd joke a bit that in both their disciplines, collaboration is essential; whereas in visual art, you're expected to stand smoking in the corner saying, "They're all hacks, no one understands my genius. puff".

But back to social messages. Are they all shake and bake? All instantly microwaveable into some sort of painting/sculpture/installation that everyone brings their own political/social/media-savvy background to?

No. There can be something strong enough to break through and galvanise people. But I think the world of visual Fine Art is tough. We are surrounded by astounding images every day, so standing still and letting a painting perform long enough to affect one's mindset as it unravels and wraps up a viewer is a difficult thing. I try it from time to time.

And once, I was so overcome, I simply sat down in the middle of the gallery, on the floor. I stretched my legs out, and just enjoyed the still oil painting on the wall and let it affect me. Security didn't mind this gothy-punk just sitting there; I was causing no harm and others could walk around me. And the painting was marvelous. I consider it now my very favourite. Science and myth thrown together on a canvas. John Atkins Grimshaw's Iris. (The science comes from the part you cannot see in a photo: thin glazes of oil forming a rainbow following the tragic arch of Iris's body).

Try it. Find an image about a current issue like global warming. Perhaps it's a block of ice in a gallery kept at temperatures cool enough to drip only slowly, or tiny plastic polar bears on the floor of the gallery. Perhaps something on the computer screen, something from antiquity, something in your local museum or art gallery or a book.

Ponder it slowly.

Be unafraid to find it shallow.

Be unafraid to say, "that's it?"

Be willing to enjoy the art of the small message for its small message.

And keep moving on, and slowing down to look until one commands your gaze. Let it mesmerise you with its memes and forms. My hope is that it will provide a rallying point for rationality in its beauty.

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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. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Congratulations, Humanist of the Year!

Congratulations to Dale McGowan, Harvard's Humanist of the Year!

If you're a parent, teacher or someone concerned with rational thinking in children, you should totally check out the book Parenting Beyond Belief, and Dale's ever-so-pretty blog, The Meming of Life. I found the chapters dealing with science and with death to be illuminating for myself as well.

And watch for Dale's new book, Raising Freethinkers.

Richly deserved. I will raise a mug of Kicking Horse coffee in honour.

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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. Please visit my blog, gallery and new! reproduction store.

Artwork Mondays: two by two all twisted

Today, Artwork Monday is a bit different. Prepare for a rant.

I don't normally comment negatively on another artists' work. And indeed, I think the technical work displayed below is superb. Suuuu-perb! It's the subject matter that raises my ire.

My wife and I came across this tremendous sand sculpture last week at the Canadian National Exhibition, or The Ex, as we Torontonians refer to it.

Cutesy Noah's Ark. Mythological extinction for the kiddies.

As you can see, all the animals, two-by-two in their little happy smiles, are getting away from the Abrahamic god's cataclysmic flood. Alas, the poor unicorns are struggling to keep up, and we know what happened to them don't we? Did they make it?

Don't know? Read the sign:

So it doesn't matter how hard they paddle, for as author Timothy Findley showed, they are not wanted on the voyage.

I get it, I do. The Noah fable is easy for kids. The young toddlers can stretch their neurons a little, counting to the number two, matching everyone up, and trying to remember and pronounce each pair of animals. Some will be easy: dog! Some will be harder, and you must chuckle to yourself with pride when a baby attempts rhinoceros or hippopotamus. Noah always looks like Santa, white beard and a smile while feeding and petting the animals.

It's got plenty of play value for a tiny human brain to learn from. Often, they're even puzzles as well as toys!

It's the focus of the Noah's Ark story that bothers me. A myth where some ancient god drowns the world of sinners and only saves a few individuals from the animal kingdom. Okay fine, let's assume in this tale that the humans all deserved it, or something. (Even the babies?) Just leave that notion over there on the table for a moment.

How to explain the wholesale slaughter, nay, extinction of all the other land animals on Earth? Umm, "yay, the filthy unicorns are all dead?" Don't tell the Church of You-Know-Who. Take that, lemur population! Take that, wallabies! Take that, star-nosed moles! Yes my, what a cheering story.

It's so twisted. The kids are encouraged to focus on the survivors, as if the flood is a natural disaster, and Noah's elite are snug in their berths. But the fable says this was done by an intelligent entity. It's not a cataclysm, it's callous pre-meditated murder. The millions and millions of organisms (billions with the insects) that drown are just left out of focus. The fable even reinforces the whole two-by-two-hetero-only stereotype.

Richard Dawkins' critics often claim he is a big meanie, and I suspect they are thinking of this quote:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all
fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a
vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist,
infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomanical,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p31.

If you ask me, he left out "extinction-generator" or "species-cidal" or something of the like.

Extinctions have fascinated me since I was a kid. The images painted by so many paleo-illustrators always had an eerie, otherworldly look to them: yellow clouds, sauropod heads looking up at the light on the horizon. Or dark cobalt skies, rife with clouds and lightning, as a few shrew-like mammals hide in the shelter of a predator's skeleton. I remember trying to stretch my mind into the expanse of years, and imagine how could the turtles and crocodiles survive?

When I drew Lord Extinction Yawns, I began with the two-by-two. I was not raised in any particular religion, and my brain had not really dawned into atheism yet. You can see the pair of trilobites I started with, though I later differentiated them with a very unlikely tail.

My idea behind this drawing was to put an allegorical face on the concept of extinction, much like many Symbolist paintings put a face on Death. I needed Extinction to be stranger, more primal, and powerful. When he idly yawned, that's when the spirits of extinct animals can swirl out of his maw of perfect teeth. Extinction is ugly. My apologies to the artist of such talent who created the Ark above, but I don't take the story that lightly.

Next time you need to buy a toddler some cutesy animal toys, why not a little rainforest set, or if you really need to hand them some scary extinction toys, be old-fashioned and grab some plastic prehistory. And then explain how some dinosaurs' descendants took flight, and marvel at the splendor of the history of the animal kingdom taking wing in a child's mind.

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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. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store. Except, I ain't taking credit for the well-crafted sand sculpture. I hope next year the Ex has a Permian extinction in sand instead.

Guild of Natural Science Illustrators Conference

There's a slew of gorgeous posters created by the talented members of The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators for the upcoming conference in July. Although I have not attended one of these conferences yet, I think the results of these lush, gorgeous and scientifically accurate artists speak for themselves.

If you are a new artist, up-and-coming, or established and need of some new techniques, get yourself to Ithaca and learn from these modern masters.

I often wonder if in a hundred years' time the art world will look back on pieces like these and marvel at their (sometimes) unrecognised value in the face of post-modernist navel-gazing. Their artwork is all the more relevant to anyone amazed by the vanishing biodiversity on our planet.

In particular, check out the work by Heather Ward (the coral reef begins!), Emily Damstra, Gina Mikel, Barry MacKay, and...aw, heck, prepare yourself for beauty and strangeness that only the real world can deliver by going to the Guild's image bank, or check out the links in my blogroll. Grab a coffee and croissant, and spend an hour this weekend marvelling.

And be responsible folks: these images are under copyright, and these folks earn their bread producing images to help scientists, medical professionals, teachers and students understand the world better. Be sure to contact artists about creating illustrations for use before cribbing them off the net!

What do you read outside?

Spring in the city! The last few days, I've stopped in Trinity-Bellwoods Park on my way home from work, and read a chapter or three of Parenting Beyond Belief, edited by Dale McGowan.

There is something satisfying about reading outdoors in the sun. I pass through Trinity-Bellwoods usually twice a day on my 30 minute walk. I've mentioned the park before, and here are a couple of even better pics of the stunning little albino squirrel, having a snack with a friend.

Parenting Beyond Belief is an excellent book I found out about backwards, through reading the editor-author's blog, Meming of Life. Dale McGowan is entertaining and informative, and also heartfelt. He knows how to mix appealing anecdotes with research, so the literary calories are not hollow.

Here in Toronto, Chapters/Indigo/Coles/World's Biggest has it listed in their system, but I can't seem to find it. A new Book City moved in, and were happy to have it delivered to the location on my walk home. Nice! The sales consultant thought it looked pretty interesting too.

It's easy for me to pick a favourite in this book. Teaching Kids to Yawn at Counterfeit Wonder, by Dale McGowan. I like anything by McGowan in particular. Even the endnotes can be entertaining.

There are science experiments you can do with kids. A beautiful letter to his daughter by Richard Dawkins, whose writing has inspired much of my painting in the past. Essays on how to deal with concepts of death with your children (and for me - this was good stuff).

This is not a ponderous, heavy book, and is not meant to be. It is a nimble conversation-starting book, a catalysing book, a deeply interesting book. It does not matter if you are atheist, Bright, religious-but-liberal-and-a-little-lapsed; a parent of adopted or natural children, an educator, or involved in some young person's life.

Never quite understood the fuss about evolution? Chapter 8: Jaw-Dropping, Mind-Buzzing Science has the easy explanation of what Darwin discovered. Order this book, and while you're waiting for it to arrive, read The Meming of Life.

There is something a little sublime when sitting below a massive, twisty old tree, reading an excellent book while the sun is shining, buds are slow-mo bursting, kids are on bikes, dogs are lolling on their backs in the grass, and you have a bottle of blueberry-green tea.

Spring is back. What have you read outside? What do you plan to read?

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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. Squirrel photos by Glendon Mellow. I tried not to hound the little guy; this was taken from a distance. It's a squirrel, ya gotta be respectful.