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 ***

ScienceOnline2010: Art & Science - what works?

At the upcoming ScienceOnline2010 in January, Felice Frankel and I will be on hand again to lead a session discussing art & science.

To follow this series of posts, click the "scio10art" label below. (I will also be doing a workshop about digital painting with a tablet - for more on that, look for posts labelled with "scio10tablet".) You may also comment or check in with our session's wiki page.
Part 1 - Art historical background to metaphor
Part 2 - Categories of visual metaphor in science art
The type of metaphor I spend a lot of time thinking about could be called narrative or allegorical metaphor. I like to use one object as a symbol for an idea, or sometimes multiple objects, to tell a story or give an image meaning.

An image I am very familiar with (and many Flying Trilobite readers will be as well) is the oil painting Darwin Took Steps I made in 2008. I'd like to use it as an example for some questions for the session. I think Darwin Took Steps is useful due to its relative popularity; it has appeared on a magazine cover, two book covers, numerous blogs, is on display in a museum in Spain and caused a ruckus on the art network deviantArt last year.

Okay, so; the Darwin painting.

1) What are your first thoughts about this painting and what it may mean?

2) How necessary do you think knowing the title was before seeing the painting to the metaphor's success? Does the title point too blatantly?

3) Is the painting disrespectful to you? Irreverent? Exalting? Does it imply worship or mockery?

4) I stuck stairs on the head of an esteemed (sometimes reviled) naturalist. How do your feelings match the metaphor?

5) Portraiture has a long history, and it's likely most people have seen portraits, possibly even the Charles Darwin photos I used as reference for this painting. What mental scaffolding does the idea of a portrait raise in your mind? How do you know when you are looking at a portrait

6) Although I'm proud of most of my paintings, this one seems to resonate with people. Let's be specific: Um why? Why a portrait of Darwin with stairs?

7) Years ago, I did another painting of an elderly gent with stairs on its head, called Disease (below). Its popularity does not approach anywhere near Darwin Took Steps.Is it the colour and skill-level of the painting? What does Charles Darwin bring to the painting that this random figure does not? Which is a more conventional portrait and why do you think so? Despite the similarities, how do the titles change your perceptions of each painting?

8) A clue to the baggage any image of Charles Darwin specifically brings is through the comments on deviantArt. Darwin Took Steps was an image-of-the-day on Feb 12 2008, and kicked off over 500 comments from dA users debating Darwin's contribution from both a scientifically & historically literate stance and a creationist stance. Few comments were directed at the painting itself.

Is the power of a metaphor through suggestion rather than explanation?


Comment below with more questions you would like to discuss, responses or directions you would like to see the discussion session move to. You don't have to be attending the un-conference to contribute!

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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 ***
A portion of the sales of reproductions of Darwin Took Steps go to benefit the Beagle Project.

Art Evolved gallery sneak peek

The newest Art Evolved time capsule gallery launches today! The theme is palaeo-environments. Here's a sketch of the painting I made for it, done in ArtRage totally digitally. Convincing pencil, eh?It's called Mountain Discovery. Click-y to enlarge-y.

Go to Art Evolved to see the finished piece, fully digital, created using ArtRage with a few last-minute Photoshop tweaks.

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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 ***

Art Monday: here's an ugly fellow

A detail from my in-progress Asthma Incubus II, painted entirely digitally using ArtRage 2.5 and my Intuos 3 tablet.

Hmm. I need to fix the eyelashes a bit. I like them long and pretty on this ugly face though.

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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 ***

ScienceOnline2010 - Digital Tablet intro

This year at ScienceOnline2010, I'll be doing a workshop about using a digital tablet. You can follow along in this series by clicking on the label, scio10tablet, below.

Most of my work is done in analog oil paint, but increasingly I am using a tablet to tweak, fix and outright paint my work. It's a fun tool, really intuitive, and I think children and adults can benefit from their use.

So what are they? Graphic tablets (aka digital tablets) are essentially a touch sensitive surface that plugs into a USB port. It usually has a few buttons you can use as hot-keys, meaning you can assign functions to them (like "undo"). The surface doesn't respond to your fingers, like an iPod Touch or iPhone - it responds to a spooky mouse and spookier pen. I say they're spooky because neither one has batteries or plugs into anything. (Click to enlarge photo) The postcard size grey rectangle on the tablet is the sensitive area, and it maps straight to your screen, even if the aspect ratio is different.

After spending months drooling over tablets er, doing research, I finally bought one in the spring. There are a lot of brands out there, and I really favour Wacom. I have a last-gen (bought in the waning days) Intuos 3. It has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, and can sense the angle of the pen. After loading the drivers, it works with something like 80 programs. (Wacom has recently put out the Intuos 4, which doubles the sensitivity, has more buttons, and comes pre-loaded with da Vinci's brain.)

The touch-sensitive surface used with the pen can do extraordinary things. Using the image program Photoshop Elements 6, here are some lines using a traditional mouse. I used the pencil setting, 100% opacity, black:

Using Photoshop Elements again, here are some similar lines using a tablet. Can you spot the difference?

Using the mouse, the lines have a consistent thickness. Using the tablet, the thickness varies. Let's try the same thing using a translucent pale colour over top of a darker colour. I'm using a digital painting program called ArtRage 2.5 this time. (For those who are interested, I'm using the oil paint setting, thinners set to 75% to increase translucency.)
Mouse:Tablet:

You can see the pressure-sensitive tablet varied not only the thickness of the line, but the opacity of the colour. Hm. It's really noticeable comparing both sides of the circle. Two words: Neat. O.

Next tutorial, I think we'll add some more colours and play with some programs using layers. Any questions? Requests? Let me know!

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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 ***

Foundation Beyond Belief

In 2009, an important new charity has been born. Foundation Beyond Belief was created to inspire atheists and secular humanists to have a new place to help. To help education, the environment and reason.

Foundation Beyond Belief's mission:
To demonstrate humanism at its best by supporting efforts to improve this world and this life; to challenge humanists to embody the highest principles of humanism, including mutual care and responsibility; and to help and encourage humanist parents to raise confident children with open minds and compassionate hearts.

Open minds and compassionate hearts = awesome.

I came to identify as an atheist reluctantly; the appeal of an afterlife is really strong to me. Perhaps that's something I share with many artists of the past, a hope for a type of near-immortality after death. However much I wish something to be true, it doesn't change what is true. It's rare that I discuss my beliefs plainly and directly on this blog, choosing to show my understanding of the world through science and some paintings dealing with atheism.

One of the founders of Foundation Beyond Belief is Dale McGowan. I worked on a blog banner for Dale in 2008, but I was a fan of his witty, insightful writing about child-raising and communication before that (which helped make the work such a treat!). His book, Parenting Beyond Belief taught me a lot about different ways to raise a freethinking happy child. I trust Dale, and can't wait to see what the Foundation is going to be able to do with support.

Here is some more about Foundation Beyond Belief, and please check out their website.

• Foundation Beyond Belief is a non-profit charitable and educational foundation created (1) to focus, encourage and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists, and (2) to provide a comprehensive education and support program for nontheistic parents.

• The Foundation will feature ten charitable organizations per quarter.

• Members join by signing up for a monthly automatic donation in the amount of their choice, and distribute it however they wish among the categories. Contributions are fully tax-deductible.

• Members can join a social network and forums centered on the ten categories of giving, advocate for causes, and help us choose new beneficiaries each quarter.

• Featured beneficiaries may be founded on any worldview so long as they do not proselytize. At the end of each quarter, 100 percent of the donations are forwarded and a new slate of beneficiaries selected.

• On the educational side, the Foundation will help create and fund local groups for the education and social support of humanist/atheist parents.

Happy New Year everyone!
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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 ***