Sunday 10 January 2010

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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7 comments:

Ian said...

I haven't read a Star Wars book for years, but the X-Wing series were my favourites.

Eric Heupel said...

DEFINITELY 4.

Peter Bond said...

2 and 3 stuck with me...

Sproglet said...

I like number 6 :)

Silver Fox said...

Number 4!

Sean Craven said...

I'd want to do 4, because it lends itself to easy abstract solutions. I'd like to see 5.

Glendon Mellow said...

Thanks for your participation everyone!

Ian: I totally agree. The X-Wing series rock. No Jedi, just kick-ass pilots fighting attrition. The passage that's from means a lot to me. A topic for another post one day. I've wrestled with mortality, and often have trouble sleeping because of it. That whole passage, when Wedge is writing the letter to the family of a dead pilot, literally helped me get to sleep one night.

Thanks Eric! Thanks Peter! Thanks Sproglet! Thanks Silver Fox! Thanks Sean!

The winner! "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

I heartily recommend this whole book. A fascinating tour of the body by one of science's clearest writers.

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