Albino Squirrels (plural!) of Trinity-Bellwoods

While walking in Trinity-Bellwoods Park a couple of weeks ago, Michelle and I saw two of the albino squirrels!

Yesterday, I managed to snap a photo of them both together before one raced out of frame up a tree. The other is on the ground in the far right of the photo. Click to enlarge.

One seems a little bigger than the other.

Excellent. Perhaps by next winter there will be a whole colony. (What's the group-name for squirrels? Herd? Clutch? Brace?)

You can see other posts about the albino squirrels of Trinity-Bellwoods here.

- - 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.

When blog-memes attack!

Jumpin' junebugs!

I've been blog-meme swarmed. Time to pay what's due and give some back. Beware, Flying Trilobite Blogrollers!
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The Me Meme
A surprise meme, inflicted upon me by Zach of When Pigs Fly Returns. Ha! I scoff at this one. Here are the rules:
1. Take a picture of yourself right now.

2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.

3. Post that picture with NO editing.

4. Post these instructions with your picture.

My camera was broken when Zach sneak-memed me. So my wife has snapped this surprise photo of me to make up for it.

Time to inflict more poorly coiffed surprise snaps on the populace. I tag Traumador, Emile, & Chris Zenga.
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The 5 Things Meme
Peter Bond of Bond's Blog is gettin' personal.
5 things I was doing 10 years ago:
1. Dating the girl who eventually married me
2. Sitting on a transparent blue inflatable couch
3. Living with a blue-fronted Amazon parrot roommate who loved cartoons
4. Lots of gothy clubbing
5. Sporting black-light sensitive dyed hair

5 things on my to do list today:
1. Work on commissioned artwork
2. Conduct interviews at my job
3. Spike my hair up
4. Admire my wife
5. Read SEED article with Craig Venter

5 snacks I love:
1. Listerine pocket packs
2. Espresso, properly run long into an Americano
3. Multigrain Tostitos & salsa
4. Apples, except for those vile 'red delicious' ones. Ew.
5. Raisin bran muffins

5 things I would do if I was a millionaire:
1. Donate buckets of cash to The Beagle Project
2. Start a campaign to outlaw 'red delicious' apples
3. Go back to school, take something in biology
4. Find time to paint more often
5. Never hear the words "student loan" again

5 places I've lived:
1. Mississauga, Ontario, Canada (until I was 6)
2. Beach area, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
3. St Mike's Hospital for a few days, Toronto
4. In an apartment with a dance major and a theatre major, Toronto
5. In the Little Italy/Portugal/Brazil area, Toronto.

5 jobs I've had:
1. Clown handing out flyers
2. American Sign Language Interpreter
3. Coffee shop barista
4. Art supply store manager
5. Freelance illustrator

5 people I'll tag: Stephanie, Mike, Kris, Mo, & Sean.
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6 Random Things Meme
A new contact has tossed this meme at me: I've been clobbered by The Darwin Report.
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

1. My heritage includes Irish, Jamaican, Panamanian, English & Dutch.
2. In high school I wrote an illustrated book about vampires and it won an award.
3. I'm learning to love spiders. Small ones.
4. At one point, I considered seriously changing my first name to "Hyper".
5. If the bulkhead doors on an underwater oil rig are slamming shut due to flooding, I'll be saved by the metal of my wedding ring. (anyone guess what it's made of?)
6. I plan on ignoring rules 5 & 6 on this meme.
For the 6 Random Things meme, I tag Chris Zenga, Geoff, Craig, Thrawn, Humblewoodcutter, & Heather.
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Whew! Glad that's over. I guess now I'll need to start selling that photo in my online shop.

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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.

Artwork Mondays: Grandmother's favourite

This drawing was always my grandmother's favourite piece of my artwork. I drew this back in the early days of university after I had largely stopped drawing vampires and faeries, and as my interest in science had started coming back to the fore. I called it "Beetleman", though I'm not really sure why.

My grandmother loved this one, and I gave her a reproduction of it. I miss my grandparents, and I'll always appreciate how they encouraged me in my artwork. My grandmother would challenge me about what I was trying to do, and pester me with questions, until she'd laugh at my answer once it was clear. My grandfather would not have much commentary about the subjects, instead asking about the media used, and supplying us with astonishing amounts of paper when my sisters and I were small.

Good times.

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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.

ScienceOnline'09 - thoughts on two cultures

In January, I will be co-moderating with Jessica Palmer on a couple of sessions at ScienceOnline'09.

Here are the first thoughts I published to the wiki for Art + Science: online and offline:

A big topic, so I’ll start where I’m familiar. Science opens up new territories for visual language and metaphor.

Using scientific discoveries, diagrams, principles and images to increase the visual language in art. This is something I strive to do with each piece. When taking history of western art 101, I recall being amazed at the idea that the general public of the Renaissance would have understood the significance of an orange on the table in a portrait. Or that much of Michaelangelo’s work was an attempt to portray platonic ideal forms.

Exploring the same sort of method for my work has led me in attempts to personify ‘extinction’ and ‘mitochondrial eve’ as beings rather than concepts, or Haldane’s precambrian rabbit quote as a puzzle. I regularly depict my wife in paintings and drawings holding diatoms, because they are beautiful, delicate, and (thinking of photosynthesis here) essential to life. An example outside of my own work would be Dali’s Christus Hypercubus (scroll down), or Jessica’s Aposematism. The golden ratio gave us this stunning cover composition in Imagine FX recently. In pop culture, I marvel at Davy Jones’ crew in the Pirates of the Caribbean series as monsters difficult to present to a public unaccustomed to detailed images of nature. I could go on.

The reverse is what’s difficult for me to see: how does science benefit from art? From viewing it, and resolving a problem or…?

Is art a parasite on science, except when used as illustration? Many naturalists are painters as well.

Seed magazine’s article by Jonah Lehrer in issue 13 was interesting. So was this Cocktail Party Physics post.

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Here are some more up-to-date thoughts I've been pondering lately, and I will update to the wiki. I think this is a better synopsis for where my head has been.
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The relationship between the cultures of art and science: does art act as a parasite on science? The benefits of scientific findings to the inspiration of art have numerous examples. Popular culture at large may benefit from art inspired by science. But does science ever benefit from art, other than illustration? Can art inspire science?

Good art usually is connected by metaphor and symbolic representations to its subject matter. Metaphor and symbols are by their very nature, imprecise descriptions of the world. Science, on the other hand strives for accuracy and precision. Is art only capable of being a metaphor for a small aspect of a single phenomena, and not the whole?

How does art inspired by, say, palaeontology differ from art inspired by physics? Will an illustration of a Mesozoic landscape always be inherently more precise than a sculpture inspired by quantum phenomena?

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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.

Banner tweak

Made a couple of small tweaks to my banner this evening since nothing historic is happening on t.v. tonight. Does it read well? I get a lot of compliments on the Art in Awe of Science tagline, so I wanted to emphasize it.

- - 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.

Artwork Mondays: the aura of oil

The aura of painting exists in the mind of the viewer, and in some cases the mind of the illustrator when seeing their own work reproduced. The idea of paintings having an aura or presence is something that has fascinated me since university, as discussed last week. Some excellent comments were made by artists Sean Craven and Chris Zenga, check it out.

Okay so from my non-scientific anecdotal samplings and personal experiences (oh the sins against science I commit! I will say ten ATP-->ADP reactions in penance), I doubt the existence of original paintings having a quasi-mystical aura or emitting a presence to the viewer. You can read a bit more about this "aura of authenticity" from an art historical perspective here, and from the side of new age-laced artsy language here (10th paragraph), and here. It's head-shakingly amazing how fear for loss of the aura is dovetailed with a fear of technology.

Is there anything special or unique then, about an original painting that does not lie entirely within the biases of the viewer? In case of oil paintings, I say yes. And looking at last week's comments, Chris Zenga guessed the point of this week's Artwork Monday while thinking about a D.N.A Candle Vanitas painting I gave to him and his wife for their marriage (at right, original post here).

I love oil painting. I enjoy the scent of the oil, and the buttery consistency flowing together under a horizontally-held fan brush. And most of all, I love the depth glazing can bring about in the final work.

Oil painting differs from other types of painting in many ways. Oils do not evaporate as they dry like watercolour or acrylic painting; instead they absorb oxygen from the air. This is called a siccative quality. The way I think about this, is like the oxygen molecules are pineapple chunks being added to Jell-o in a confined bowl. Adding more will increase the density and stop the Jell-o from jiggling. I don't know that this is a chemically-apt description, so please feel free to tell me there's not room for Jell-o in the comments if I am mangling the science of siccatives.

For this reason, it's important that oil paintings are painted in thin layers with an increasing amount of oil in successive layers. It allows the oxygen to permeate evenly over the course of six months to a year after painting, and helps prevent cracking. The rule is referred to as "fat over lean".

So oil paintings, particularly by Renaissance and Baroque masters, contained many thin, mostly transparent layers of paint, each tinted with a little pigment. And herein lies the aura of a painting viewed live versus online.

When light hits all these layers of oil, it permeates each oily membrane and begins to reflect back out. But some photons will bounce back into the oil layers off of the pigments, and back to the lower layers before pinging back out of the painting, and onward to the viewers eyes. This optical effect literally creates a glow. It's also the reason for the incredibly deep blacks often found in the backgrounds of portraits.

So the illusion of depth in an oil painting can be profoundly eye-catching, and similar to looking at objects in water, the oil-glazes draw our eyes and captivate our pattern-seeking centers, making the paint feel alive. No unscientific aura necessary, just wonderful chemistry interacting on our biology.

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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.