February 22nd, 2010
I’m disappointed to note that my brief fling with Jim Gurney’s “Art by Committee” has come to an end, now that Jim has put the monthly challenge on an indefinite hiatus (giving him more time to focus on his fascinating ongoing tour of art techniques and great artists, I note with admiration). There are lots of fish in the sea, of course, and Illustration Friday looks like a good replacement.
Illo-Friday offers a challenge that is more open-ended than Jim’s: rather than a page of text or a business card, it offers only a word. From there, your artistic mind is free to roam — so long as you get your picture in before the following Friday. This week’s topic is “propagate”, and you can see above what I did with it. It was certainly an interesting exercise: I started by attempting to depict one meaning of the word, and found when I was part way through that I had captured two.
Tags: Illustration Friday, propagate
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February 21st, 2010
Detail from James Ensor's "The Tower of Lissewege" (1890)
It is by now old news that blogging has forever changed the nature of how information is generated and consumed, but the full ramifications of this change continue to play themselves out all around us today — and will go on doing so for some time yet. The latest area to be transformed is the global war for public opinion over the issue of climate change. As my friend Jeet Heer argues in a fascinating piece in this weekend’s Globe and Mail (”Climategate’s guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs?“), climate change skeptics have found their greatest influence to lie not in peer reviewed journals or congressional hearings but in blogs written by passionate amateurs — sometimes highly intelligent ones — who are determined to subject even the smallest component of the international climate change assessment process to scrutiny and, once in a while, disproof.
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Tags: climate bloggers, climategate, jeet heer
Posted in Environment | No Comments »
February 16th, 2010
A fast heads-up that Alaska-based writer Charles Wohlforth has a new book coming out on June 8 called The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering our Ability to Rescue the Earth (you can read an excerpt here), which focuses on the relationship between the possibilities and limits of human nature, and the scale of the environmental crisis we now face. Wohlforth is a man worth following; his last book, The Whale and the Supercomputer, remains one of the best books I’ve ever read on the environment. I reviewed it for the San Francisco Chronicle back in 2004, using words that seem even more relevant amid today’s artificial tempest over the IPCC’s methodologies:
In [computer-based climate] models, the number of possible variables is near infinite, while our understanding of the natural processes underlying each variable is in its infancy at best. Meanwhile, the unrelenting logic of chaotic systems, which declares that one can’t possibly predict the future state of such a system without being impossibly accurate about its initial starting conditions, leaves science at a loss. [...]
This uncertainty, of course, has spawned endless scientific and political debate about the existence and nature of climate change. But Wohlforth wisely points out that though we can’t create models that eliminate (or even reduce) the number of uncertainties, we can at least choose to “rank important certainties above trivial unknowns.” After all, we do understand the dynamics of the mechanism that causes global warming, and we do understand the importance of greenhouse gases as a determinant of our planet’s temperature, an importance second only to the sun. The global climate is like a massive machine with banks of labeled dials. We can’t know for sure what the machine will produce when all the dials are turned in different directions, but we do know that we’re deliberately cranking the second-biggest dial — the one labeled “atmospheric CO2 content” — far beyond any previous setting. And in doing so, we’re performing an irreversible experiment with the only planet we’ve got.
The Fate of Nature can of course be pre-ordered on Amazon. If I end up reviewing it for one of the tree-based papers, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Tags: Charles Wohlforth, climate change, The Fate of Nature, The Whale and the Supercomputer
Posted in Environment | No Comments »
February 15th, 2010
I had a bit of a crisis a couple of weeks back. I’d been working diligently on this whole “learning to draw” project for five and a half months, and had steadily worked my way through ups and downs to a point where I could say that my skills had progressed from “really very bad” to “mediocre”. This was a significant source of personal pride for me, as I hadn’t been sure when I started that I would manage to reach any higher level of artistic competence at all. I was feeling pretty good, frankly.
Then I watched Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary on Valentino.
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Tags: drawing, learning
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February 11th, 2010
There is something about the far north that photography finds deeply compatible — something, perhaps, in its minimalism, its starkness of contrasts between sea and ice, its naked ruggedness. Canadian photographer David Burdeny (I briefly wrote about him here) captures its spirit very effectively in majestic tones of grey and blue, but Kevin Cooley of Brooklyn, New York, has managed to uncover a surprising and beautiful vein of light and colour in the lands between ourselves and the pole. A “photo and video artist” who works with a range of major magazines and book publishers, Cooley’s fine art often focuses on lonely images of people or, more enigmatically, of arcs of light in the midst of forbiddingly indifferent landscapes (see his 2008 collection “light’s edge“). But I’m personally even more attracted to his 2006 “svalbard” series, which capture the unique and subtle interplay of colours seen in the first light of morning — after four months of darkness — in Norway’s Longyearbyen, the northernmost town in the world.
Kevin Cooley, "Longyearbyen Overview" (2006)
Tags: David Burdeny, Kevin Cooley, Longyearbyen, photography
Posted in Art & literature, Environment | No Comments »
February 7th, 2010
There is a kind of long-term shock that comes with the realization that the landscape around one’s own home is being altered beyond recovery. Psychologically, after all, a landscape is a permanent thing — hills and forests and paths are unchanging things to a child, and even when one moves away in adulthood they are assumed to remain protected, inviolate. Increasingly, of course, this assumption is wrong: the relentless spread of housing developments, roads, and shopping centres means that many people in the industrialized world face a high probability of losing the landscapes they remember as children. To some extent the shock lies in the simple unexpectedness of the change.
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Tags: j.r.r. tolkein, solastalgia, the lord of the rings, upper hunter valley
Posted in Art & literature, Environment | No Comments »
January 15th, 2010
My contribution to James Gurney’s latest “Art by Committee” challenge. The assignment was to illustrate the following extract from a science fiction novel manuscript:
This one was a great learning exercise from a composition point of view, driving me to rough out several possible scenes before finally choosing a close-up of Billy’s face — and even then I experimented with just how close the close-up should be. Billy, I thought, is a man trying bravely to cope with an unanticipated glacier of indifference from a formerly close female friend. And this being the near-future, he’s staring into the unforgiving lens of a laptop camera while he wages this internal struggle.
Yet another argument against videophones, in my opinion. Dating is hard enough without that.
Tags: Art by Committee, dating, james gurney
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December 27th, 2009
Copying from the masters being one of the most hallowed traditions in art education, this is a sketch I made from a drawing by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845), the great genre artist and portraitist of Napoleonic France. Boilly’s full work is of his family and servants, and this is one of his two sons — although the artist would probably be amused to see that my inadvertent elongation of the boy’s face (an artistic tic I’m trying to rid myself of, not yet successfully) has transformed his cute ten-year-old into a young man of about sixteen. Go here for Boilly’s original, part of an exhibition of eighteenth-century French drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.
Tags: eighteenth-century French art, Louis-Léopold Boilly
Posted in Art & literature, Drawings | No Comments »
December 25th, 2009
The second in my apparently annual series of Yuletide mullings (last year’s “In the bleak midwinter” discussed the darker seasonal myths of medieval Germany) was triggered by a headline I spotted on my train ride home from work a week ago. “NORAD fighter pilots prepare to escort Santa”, it read; beneath it was a photo of two Canadian air force CF-18s. It’s a yearly tradition, of course — I have a vague memory of listening to “radar updates” on Santa’s progress as a kid in the 1970s — but still, something about it grated on me.
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Tags: beliefs, NORAD, Santa Claus
Posted in Myth | No Comments »
December 21st, 2009
It is not normally my practice to blog from work (see “mortgage payments”), but having discovered historian Rob MacDougall’s Old is the New New via his link to Jeet Heer’s Sans Everything post on Homer Simpson and Irish stereotypes, I was immediately entranced by both his buoyant writing style and his remarkably eclectic range of historico-cultural interests — so I felt compelled to drop what I was doing and tell you about it. Go check out his site, and for your first mind-expanding sally, read his post Angels and Octopodes.
What are you still doing here? Go!
Tags: Octopodes, Rob MacDougall
Posted in Art & literature, History | No Comments »
