Bat says hi. I had a cat named Batty. Then I changed her name to Phoebe.
The Massive Paws of Elder Persons
The massive paws of elder persons is a quote by Hilaire Belloc published in The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, 1896. I feel like I am trying to avoid the massive paws too, dodging cookie cutter jobs and a cookie cutter life. I imagine that I live inside the little door, but the massive paws are so scary! I am surrounded!
This drawing reminds me of Charles Addams, whom I love. I wonder if the white bottom is uncomfortable. Maybe I will play around with making a light wash. Here since the background is also white, maybe it works.
Courtroom in Everett, Washington
I had to observe a trial for a class I took. Since I had never visited Everett, I decided to go to that courthouse. There are many nice old Victorian houses in Everett that are slowly decaying and in bad condition. The trial was held in February of 2015, in the Snohomish County Superior Courthouse. It involved a man accused of stealing an RV and driving it on a high speed police chase, which ultimately resulted in the destruction of a mobile home.
Observing the trial, I thought about the difference between childhood and adulthood. How adults perceive childhood to be a time of endless possibilities, while a courtroom feels like a place where possibility ends, and punishment begins.
I think for many children, possibility narrows much earlier than adulthood. Adults need not stop believing that possibilities expand before them, but sometimes they do not know how to grasp them.
In the Up documentary series that chronicles the lives of several British citizens as they age, the narrator reads a poem at the beginning of each film, "give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man." Who was this man, accused of stealing an RV, when he was seven years old?
Axolotls, part 2
Fantastical axolotls hanging out in the tunnel with the broken digging machine, Bertha, in Seattle.
Its hard to see but mice have already built a functional city beneath ground, complete with transport system. The axolotls are laughing at the humans.
The cat among the pigeons
Fellow rats, watch out!
I think I would like to do this again with a cat in rat clothing.
The owls are not what they seem
David Lynch says..."the owls are not what they seem"
These owls have been following me for quite some time now. This is my first drawing of them, but I'm sure many will follow.
Jimmy Liao
In 2011, I bought the book The Sound of Colors by Jimmy Liao. I gave the book to my grandmother, who had started a steep decline into a world of dementia. The book discusses a young girl who is losing the ability to see, which I knew my grandmother would relate to since she was losing the ability to think. At that point she had more self-awareness.
Before I gave the book to Nana, I tried doing an illustration in his style. I picked a cityscape and added Russian onion domes. As a child I loved cityscapes.
I just found it recently. It is interesting to look at now, knowing that I did it before I had any serious knowledge or interest of children's illustration.
One interesting thing about this practice is that I used out of the box watercolor paints, which I never do any more, and a regular sharpie marker. Now I have more "professional' tools, but it is interesting to use these simpler ones, because that is what children would be familiar with. I remember as a child often finding it unfair that I didn't know and couldn't learn how the artists made their pictures. Even now, it is surprising to learn about techniques not used anymore like four color printing.
I think there should be picture books for people with dementia or other mental conditions.
Gemütlichkeit- the cozy
Gemütlichkeit is an Indo-European word that has variants in German, Norweigain, Swedish, Dutch and Russian. The closest English word is cozy, but gemütlichkeit also means social acceptance and well being.
These homes, reflect both homes primarily from history, like the traditional Chinese house, and also more modern homes, like apartment balconies. The yurt is especially cool. Yurts are from Mongolia and other Central Asian areas, but it looks like this one found its way to the Pacific Northwest.
I think gemütlichkeit is an important concept to foster in children's books. Even non fiction or scary books can promote curiosity and love for the world at large. Adults become sour and start to enjoy creepy facts that make them scared, and laugh at cartoons of conniving businessmen in backrooms. Children live with the possibility that any one of these cute houses could one day be their own. Their world does not involve a balance sheet that knows that curb appeal costs extra, or that money is hard to earn.
I love the German Romantic painter Carl Spitzweg, I think he is the ultimate master of gemütlichkeit, while still communicating some uncomfortable subjects like encroaching industrialization.
Axolotls, part I
Axolotls are a species of salamander that originated in the underground caves of what became Mexico City. The name derives from Aztec and means "water monster." Axolotls are an unusual species. Although they have legs, they cannot walk, and only swim. They evolved from tiger salamanders, which can breathe air. Axolotls, like fish can only breath underwater. The large red appendages on either side of their face are actually external gills. Occasionally axolotls develop thyroid disorders and turn into land salamanders.
Axolotls are critically endangered in their native habitat. They only lived in two lakes; Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco. Lake Chalco has since been drained because it posed a flooding risk to the burgeoning human population. The axolotl had the misfortune of sharing its home with the second most populated human city of the New World.
However, axolotls are used at many university research facilities throughout North American and the world as model organisms. Axolotls are of special interest to scientists because they can regenerate their limbs, and have unusual anti-aging components. They can live up to 15 years, which is long for an amphibian.
Axolotls first came to the attention of scientists when the species arrived in Paris's Jardin des Plantes in the 1860s . Most research and pet axolotls are genetically related to those breed in Paris. One particularly large colony of axolotls lived at Indiana University from 1976 to 2005. The university obtained the colony from the University of Buffalo, which in turn got much of its stock from Paris. The Indiana University Axolotl Colony has moved to Lexington, Kentucky.
A cool video about axolotl research can be viewed at, https://youtu.be/FTZ2wUUQO30
Aztecs used to eat axolotls, and it looks like Japanese are eating them too! In Japan, they are known now as 'wooper loopers.'
One of my goals for the year of 2015 is to get an axolotl. I need to get better at cleaning and organizing first though.
Parking lot, San Bernardino, California
A parking lot of a chain store drawn from a chain hotel in San Bernardino. The hotel was filled with business people who live in the hotel for weeks at a time. Some come on Monday and leave at the end of the work week, heading West to Los Angeles, or to airports that will take them further away, to migrate home like birds. It is harder to track business migration than it is to be a birder. With birding there are guide books and established coloration patterns. Business people are more difficult to pin down.
The core
In the last post I reference the core of liberty. Here is a real core:
As it turns out, when we eat apples we are eating the sexual reproductive organ of a plant. Most fruits and nuts are ovaries. In the case of an apple, the part we eat is the swollen hypanthium that surrounds the core, which is the ovary. Interestingly many nut species, like Brazil nuts and walnuts are simply hardened ovaries. Some fruits are more complex. Pineapples consist of many ovaries fused together from adjacent flowers.
All flowers have ovaries, but not all ovaries turn into fruits.
Fishing bear from Russia
As I look at the hand carved polar bear figurine on my desk, I think about the devolving political situation in Russia. I think about what I loved about learning Russian; the fairy tale stories, the interesting old peasant houses, the Slavic gods like Stribog, the lyrical flow of the Cyrillic letters. It was exciting to figure out how different customs relate to a common humanity.
Now, I wonder if I will ever go to Russia again. I wonder if this wooden figurine has more freedom than the person who carved it. Now, politicians scream, war brews in Ukraine, and progress appears hopeless.
What is the core of liberty? The pencil writing on the bottom of my watercolor sketch says, "freedom and self-sufficiency"
Kitchen and yard rot
Most fruit consists of an enlarged ovary of what was once a flower. After we eat, we throw away all kinds of interesting looking shapes. Peach pits. orange peels, strawberry stems, giving no more thought to them than candy wrappers.
The backyard and sidewalks also have a myriad of life. It is difficult to pay close attention to while people get ready for work, rush by on jogs, and walk their dogs. Often it is only when we go to a new place that we stop and see what is around us.
Dover stickers
I used stickers from Dover Little Activity books to make a pirate scene. The pirate comes from Pirate Stickers, and the illustration was originally done by Steven James Petruccio.
The spider comes from Spider Stickers, artwork by Lisa Bonforte. The octopus is a sticker I found at a zine store in Tacoma called the Nearsighted Narwhal.
The fish I painted was one I saw in the Tacoma Deception Pass zoo. It is a banggai cardinalfish, which originates in the Banggai islands of Indonesia. In the wild it is endangered, but has become a popular aquarium fish. One interesting behavior it exhibits is that males keep the eggs in their mouths for some time after mating.
Jars
I like jars and the pickles that can be put in them because they represent something that an individual human can make and use. This month, I made four jars of refrigerator pickles for the first time. I later learned that botulism commonly breeds in vegetables and not fruits, so maybe next time I will feel more comfortable pickling fruits.
Could we pickle happiness?
"Man is a political animal?" Aristotle, are we still?
Are humans naturally political? Probably, on some level. After all, chimpanzees have wars too.
People try to run away from politics like they try to flush feces down the toilet. Only the thing is that both feces and politics (or maybe it is one and the same) can kill you if it doesn't work right. Many people are anxious to discuss our species' "natural" propensity to violence, sex, drugs, laze. But try talking to them about politics...and they will be quiet. Yet most of us enjoy going to the store and buying tomatoes grown in Mexico and picked by poor indigenous laborers that are paid almost nothing and exposed to too many pesticides. We wear clothes stitched by children in sweatshops, pay our taxes to the government... then we claim we "aren't political".
I have toyed with the idea of drawing political cartoons. I liked the old 1970s copies of MAD my father kept, the Crumb drawings and Charles Addams. I still like the look of Soviet and pre 1950s US propaganda. But people can so easily find something wrong with it, and many feel uncomfortable with it inherently. Drawing and writing for children can be just as political (and usually it is), but it is more difficult for many people to see it. I think fewer and fewer people sit and think about it.
Chimpanzee Politics book:
http://www.amazon.com/Chimpanzee-Politics-Power-among-Apes/dp/0801886562
Here are my two attempts at political cartoons:
I especially like the first one about US torture policies like water boarding.
Pomegranates
I love pomegranates. They are one of the few fruits still available only parts of the year. Grocery stores do not carry them in summer months. As a teenager I used to stuff as many seeds in my mouth as possible like a hamster storing seeds, and revel in the disgusting mess of spitting them out.
Recently I read a book called Pomegranates: A Soviet Botanist's Exile From Eden, which discussed Dr. Gregory Levin's research of pomegranates, his quest to find rare varieties of the genus, and the destruction of his research station after the end of the Cold War. Despite losing family members to the Siege of Leningrad, and his pomegranate forest to a drought, Levin remained ever passionate about the plant.
Apparently, somewhere hiding in the mountains of Central Asia, there is a blue pomegranate, uncultivated and wild, hiding its magic from human profiteers.
Post thanksgiving binge
I read that the word binge gained widespread use in the English language during World War I, and originally referred to Oxford students going out after exams, but not necessarily getting drunk. During the Great War, it was primarily used among officers. Incidentally, this year is the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. I guess all of us who don't know what trench foot is do have a lot to be thankful for ....
Cracking out of the shell →
My blog hatches
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