Art Monday: tangling some blue

Last week I was tagged by Mike of Tangled Up In Blue Guy with a blogging meme. So can I out-blue the Blue Guy?

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random arbitrary 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.

Keeping a blue theme in mind, I'm going to change the rules a bit. I'll talk about my associations with colour, and things I often teach about pigments. Here we go.

Phthalocyanine Blue: Throughout university, this blue appealed to me. It has a green undertone which made it feel dirtier and more like a blue you'd encounter in a mysterious forest. Painting pale flesh tones was daunting early on, so I'd paint them in blue tones. Gradually I warmed up to greens with naples yellow, and then red with naples yellow. But blue was a safe place to start, so far removed from human pigment.

French Ultramarine: I'm going to say this out loud on the internet, and it's a scandal. I'm more nervous about admitting this to Mike than announcing to the world I'm an atheist. I hope we will still be friends. Mike's blog is named Tangled Up in Blue Guy after a song by Bob Dylan. I can't stand Bob Dylan. Oh, I'm not ashamed of this. Bob Dylan drives me nuts. No redeeming value to his music to my ears. This shouldn't be a surprise with what I've mentioned about music in the past. Mike, do I still have a free pass to comment on your blog? Or has it been revoked?

Mauve (blue shade): The Symbolist era of painting in the "Mauve 1890's" is the era I feel the strongest affinity to, though it is almost the antithesis of what I paint. Much of the fin-de-siecle angst was about harkening back to an earlier period of art, literature and myth. Fear of modernisation and industrialisation drive much of the subjects of art at this time. The Impressionist movement was largely ignored by artists I see as heroes, such as Redon, Deville, Moreau, and (my favourite) Khnopff. Instead they painted Salome with the head of John the Baptist, sphinxes and chimaeras, tombs and beautiful Mannerist-style bodies. I love the Symbolist aesthetic, but I am an artist in awe of science when it comes to my subject matter.

Indanthrene Blue: When walking my dog in a wooded park, sometimes we'd stop and I'd lie on my black and stare up at a deep blue autumn sky. And just try to absorb all - that - blue. Beautiful scattered light blue.

Cobalt Rose: Cobalt is an expensive, mildly toxic, strong tinting, long-lasting (we're talking centuries) blue pigment. And it reminds me of Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D, there are a type of goblin called kobolds. And the pigment is named after them, for the difficulty of mining it and for its poisonous nature.

Cerulean Blue: Go to an art gallery, and take a look at the religious paintings. (Go ahead, you can be an atheist and think they're beautiful, it's fine. Think of the talented humans who created them and be in awe.) You may notice that the virgin Mary is often wearing bright blue. No doubt some twisty theological logic may explain this. There's also a simpler economic reason.

Blues described as 'caeruleum' were quite expensive in medieval and Renaissance times. A patron would send the artist to the apothecary to purchase a certain amount of expensive pigments to pridefully show-off their piety. Who to paint in expensive colours? The most important person in the painting would be Jesus Christ. But he was mainly depicted as an infant or semi-nude in crucifixtion scenes.

So the expensive paint would adorn Jesus's mother, Mary. So you know. Praise blue.

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Time to meme-tag. I tag Bond's Blog, Of Two Minds, Laelaps, The Darkened Face of Heaven, Eastern Blot, and The Evilutionary Biologist.

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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.

Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle

"...Evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water.
"When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J.B.S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.' "No such anachronistic fossils have ever been authentically found..." -Richard Dawkins

-p127-128, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006.
Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN-13: 978-0-618-68000-9.

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Finally dry, a new scan of my Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle. Oil paint on 9 pieces of shale, 2008. Prints now available.


Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (configuration A): False Rabbit
available as greeting cards, mounted print, matted print and canvas print. Click here.

Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (configuration B): True Trilobites
available as greeting cards, mounted print, matted print and canvas print. Click here.
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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.

Your favourite museum?

Boneyard 26 will be hosted by Traumador the Tyrannosaur! Never participated in a blog carnival before? Curious? It's easy. There's usually an overall theme to the carnival. In the case of the Boneyard it focuses on fossils and palaontology.

Sometimes, the specific edition of the carnival will focus on a certain theme, and for Boneyard 26, Traumador is asking people to write a post about their favourite museum.

Write up a fantastic post about the museum you haunt, and alert contact Traumador by email or comment on this post!

- - 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.

Vote for art in awe of science!

The Flying Trilobite is nominated in The Canadian Blog Awards! You can find my blog listed in the Photo-Art category.
Vote for some art in awe of science! First round of voting ends November 29th, so click that tiny circle. You know you love clicking tiny circles. You knooow it.

(And don't forget to vote for Traumador the Tyrannosaur in the Best Canadian Sci-Tech category!)
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You can also nominate past posts from The Flying Trilobite for inclusion in OpenLab08, the best of science blogging on the web!

The competition accepts cartoons, so just specify if you are nominating my whole post or just my artwork. Simply use this form to nominate a past post!

And hurry! Nominations close November 30th! You lurve filling out online forms, right?
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If you need a reminder of Flying Trilobite art & science goodies, may I direct you to the art links in my sidebar? You can click on oil paint, pencil drawings, or even paintings on shale. Remember, items in my gallery only count if you nominate the blog post they appeared in.

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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.

Art Monday: it doesn't always work

Dark! Dark are the days when the artist's mind and hand will not act with confidence, but with trepidation, and lo, the monstrous paint that issues forth from his palette vexes him and plagues his talent. For true, not every act of creation can escape sucking.

This bombastic post is about the paintings that haven't been rehabilitated. I hope to have some news in the near future, and I am working on a number of projects a the moment. Today, I will shine a light on what happens when they don't work out.

Usually after reading some scientific discovery and musing about it, most ideas pop into my head like a full-blown image. I know what I should do to make it happen, and the idea is laid out in my mind's eye like pages in a book. I'm just copying from my imagination. If there are elements missing, well that's where research takes over, and I look for something appropriate to the subject.

Mother MarsThis oil painting languished unfinished for over a year. The Mother-Nature-on-Mars figure was complete, the sky complete and even the inscription (hard to make out on a blog) of "ALH84001" on the rock.

I stretched it myself, and seriously planned on painting over the entire image many, many times. It needed a baby, an egg, something at the start of life. Over and over I painted mermaid's purses, more accurately known as shark's eggs. The night before a gallery show, I frantically painted a huge microorganism complete with a chain of magnetite like they found in the infamous Martian meteorite. I kept stealing glances at it at the show. The painting surprised me. A wasted, dying mother nature and dying microbaby found dignity instead of a coat of black gesso.

Trilobite Graveyard (detail of headstone)


Which trilobitologist hasn't hoped to come across this legendary place? This painting is what unfortunately happens when I haven't thought it all the way through. In 2006 my wife challenged me to give a landscape a try, and I thought of an underwater scene, with yellow light for some reason, and a graveyard of trilobites stretching away into the distance. With well over 10 000 species recorded, this would be a fitting way to show their vast numbers,vast age, and the vast populations gone from our fair Earth.

I just couldn't pull it out of its ugly phase. (And, true to the nature of this post, my camera is broken and I seem to have deleted the photo of the whole image, and have only this detail. Arrgh, I say. )

I thought about anomalocaris prowling above, like predatory caretakers. It would add a mournful tone, for the predators can't outlast their prey for long, and add a sense of mystery as to what happened.

I thought about adding a fetching scuba diver to draw the viewer into the scene. Most people respond easily to an image they know, such as a human. Making it an attractive woman would also garner attention, and elements like long hair floating upward with bubbles would allow me to demonstrate the scene is underwater.

I thought about a monstrous underwater temple with a particularly spiky trilobite on top, off in the murky distance. Perhaps the trilobites were up to something sinister, or represented a vast empire in eldritch Cthulhu-esque prehistoric times?

So instead, this Art Monday, let me direct you to the following spectacular artwork that have themes -successfully!- similar to the Trilobite Graveyard:
various episodes of Walcott's Quarry at eTrilobite for the menacing anomalocarids;
at Druantia Art, an underwater scene in progress that is breathtaking even in unfinished form (buy her calender!);
bold rays of light not afraid to overlay some colour at The Day After;
and the beginnings of Cthulhu's rise at When Pigs Fly Returns.

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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.

Art Monday: Gryposaurus skull sketch

Went to the Royal Ontario Museum last Friday, and spent some time with the museum's original dinosaur skeleton, Gryposaurus incurvimanus.

Sketching in a public space is always an interesting activity. I throw on my iPod to draw only if I'm on a secluded bench outdoors. Otherwise, you can miss the comments from curious passers-by.

I was asked if I was a student, or there with my art class, about 4 or 5 times. I'll take that as a compliment that I look younger than I am! Kids are funny, they are so-o-o curious about what you're doing, but inherently polite enough to hover until they're invited to have a look. Some young guys told me they like to draw and think dinosaurs are interesting too: I hope they're inspired. It's nice to chat with parents, teachers and students on trips about why I'm there.

I think the reason I'm there is mainly because it's relaxing and challenging to try and accurately draw an animal skull or fossil.

Drawing in public is one of those times an artist can receive immediate feedback. Thanks to my fellow visitors for the encouragement. My one wish is that the museum's hours were a little different. The only night they're open later than 5:30pm is Fridays, which is a tough night to commit to drawing every week.

The gryposaurus was the R.O.M.'s first fossil dinosaur, collected in 1918 from Drumheller Alberta, and installed in 1920. A nice, big, honkin' duckbill. I was standing kind of close, looking up at it, so the drawing is not entirely a side-view. I spent more time on it than I had for some of the other images I've drawn from the R.O.M., and I'm mostly happy with the proportions.

Here's some other fossil skull sketches from my gallery. I've thought about offering prints in my repro shop...perhaps in the new year.

Hmm. Which fossil in the R.O.M. should I tackle next?

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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.