The Flying Trilobite

Monday, 11 April 2011

Two Arthropods Meet - a teeny commission challenge

After meeting the tireless Karyn Traphagen at ScienceOnline11 in January, she asked me for an unusual commissioned painting: something on slate, no larger than 1.5"x2".

It was more difficult than I had thought. I have often painted creatures and details that small -I knew I had the right brushes- but I had never tried to fit a whole composition in something that small.

The challenge was on.

Apparently I drink too much coffee to reliably use the camera's up-close feature.

The piece languished on my desk for a little while, unfinished, until I came up with the idea of adding the ladybug, an image that I've done in a similar way before in pencil. I added a bit of gold-coloured paint (actually titanium-coated mica flakes) to the ladybug to give it a shimmer.

Here's the final piece:

Thanks Karyn!
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Interested? I have a couple of larger, similar pieces painted on slate for sale and I remain available for commissions.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

under Creative Commons Licence.

Friday, 8 April 2011

Upcoming SONSI Gallery Show

Really excited about this!

Postcard design by Jennifer Osborn. Illustrations © individual artists of SONSI.

Postcard design by Jennifer Osborn.

For the month of May, I'll be taking part in the Southern Ontario Nature & Science Illustrators first gallery show at the Burlington, Ontario, Royal Botanical Gardens. You can view the press release here.

I'll be showing the original oil painting of my popular Darwin Took Steps, and a high-quality print of my Pink Parasaurolophus, which will be for sale with the frame included. Here they are below, all framed up for the show:

We've got upwards of 25 members in SONSI, and I can't wait to see this show. I also think this show will be Darwin Took Steps's sawn song - it's easily my most popular image, but I don't want to keep pushing it. Time to put my best foot forward with something new.

Actually, I'm hoping maybe to do a series of prehistoric critters as brightly coloured and as stylized as the Pink Parasaurolophus. Maybe an alphabet? I think framed like it is above, it could make a nice series of prints for a child's bedroom.

If you're interested in this print, you can also get them framed or unframed in my online store.

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

Monday, 4 April 2011

Slutwalk and Koran Burning

[Preamble: I'm a white atheist straight male living in Toronto Canada. So, except for the atheist thing, I'm speaking on these political, gender and religious issues from a position of privilege. This blog post represents my understanding at the moment.]

SlutWalk
Today, here in my beloved city of Toronto a huge crowd rallied and marched and demonstrated in the first possibly annual Slutwalk. It was in response to an idiotic, insensitive hurtful, perpetuating-antiquated-stereotypes comment by a Toronto Police officer who said, "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized".

The SlutWalk encourages women to dress how they want to dress, and joined by their families if they wish, to march from Queen's Park (our Province of Ontario house of legislature for you non-Canucks) to Police Headquarters. The basic message is simple: it doesn't matter how a woman dresses, she is not asking to be assaulted or raped.

The SlutWalk Toronto site is here.
BlogTO.com has a great interview about it.
Our Lady of Perpetual Win comments about it on Almost Diamonds.
Some footage from the rally by Torontopia.

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Koran Burning
To shift gears, let's look at the actions of the Pastor in the USA who burned a Koran after threatening months ago to do so. At first largely unnoticed by mainstream media, it was announced in Afghanistan by Hamid Karzai. After last Friday's prayers, a mob, possibly filled with Taliban infiltrators left a mosque, rioted and attacked a UN building, beheading two, and killing in total 15 people, revised upwards to 21 the next day.

New York Times.
Sam Harris's take on his new blog, with which I largely agree.
Josh Rosenau's response on Thoughts from Kansas, with which I largely disagree.
Notes and Comment.
Why Evolution is True.

Josh and I had a brief discussion on Twitter about it. If I may say, in the end I concluded, "Well it seems you and I agree the pastor is wrong to some degree, but murder is worse than book-burning to some degree."The rest of the conversation was a disagreement over the degree of blame lies at the Pastor's feet.

Basically, I find a lot of attention and blame in the media and some bloggers online are blaming the idiotic Pastor who burned the Koran for the deaths of the UN officials and other civilians in Afghanistan.

What he did was provocative and idiotic, but hardly worth murder, beheadings and attacking an all-girls school (wtf, but yes really).

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Responsibility for Violence
I can see a parallel - and very very significant differences- between the Pastor's Koran Burning and Slutwalk. Saying the Pastor should expect and therefore be be blamed for fanatical Islamic violence is similar in some ways to saying a "woman is asking for it".

The Pastor is an ass - I personally don't like book burnings. I once worked at a school library where I was asked to burn some beautiful old Andrew Lang Colour Fairy books in the incinerator, because they were unpopular. I took 'em home. Josh pointed me to this post by PalMD pointing out that book-burning can be an act of violence and not just expression. But book-burning by a denounced nutbar should not be conflated to responsibility for beheading and murdering.

Women should absolutely dress however they want. I agree with Ontario not having a double-standard when it comes to toplessness (though the social stigma is mainly still there, the legal barrier was and should have been removed.) Standards of what constitutes "proper" dress are fluid with the times and with individual tastes. One person's conservative is another person's offensive. And no clothing choice should be conflated to responsibility for being raped.

In both situations, the blame for violence falls with the perpetrator of the violence, not with anyone who may or may not have provoked them.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

under Creative Commons Licence.

Friday, 1 April 2011

Flying Trilobite in the new Blogger Dynamic Views

Blogger has been adding more and more functionality. Check out this video for whole new Dynamic Views you can use to look at and read The Flying Trilobite:

All of these are enabled in preview form by clicking http://glendonmellow.blogspot.com/view
Or click on one of the options below:

Flipcard

Mosaic (This may be my favourite.)

Sidebar

Snapshot

Timeslide

Soon, these will be available as new Blogger templates. Do you have a favourite? Should I go for one of these? I love the artsy view of Mosaic - I just hope the background would come in black or green.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

under Creative Commons Licence.