Short video of me working on various projects

under the microscope

I have no idea what these are. They are from a plant but I don't know what kind. I think these are the leftover support structures of poppy seed pods, if anyone knows, please tell me. My wife found several of them mostly intact and they remind me of radiolaria, my own drawings & wax work, and some of Anna Hepler's sculptures.

Black Locust Thorns

I'm sculpting a shell out of wax

This thing is actually grown by adding little blobs of molten wax which make up the striated texture. It is completely hollow. It is one inch long.

I didn't realize my scanner was so dusty, I guess I should clean it.

soap

out for a walk

Blastula

Some mushrooms (out of HUNDREDS) I found in the woods this morning

Bones I found in John's garden

A friend of mine just fertilized his garden plot with crushed sea shells. I decided to look over the little white pieces, and I found a little vertebrae. Then I found another. I kept looking until 5 minutes had past without me finding any more. They're so delicate, porous, and surprisingly intact.

More cool things to have around, yay!

stem cell bacteriosa squared (my first flash movie)

to be continued

Forever Beginning

I started a new drawing based on a cell floating in a puddle of goo the day before yesterday. I decided to draw the entire grid beforehand, and then I can decide what to do within the cells. My plan at this point is to fill in the geometric cells with ovals like I usually do, but there are so many paths I can take from this point that I want to just sit back and assess it for a bit. If I ran off quality prints of this grid on several sheets of the same type of paper, I could explore various outcomes from this initial condition. I could record and print the various drawings as I draw them, and I could make a taxonomic evolutionary progression, displaying them as such. If I were printing stages of an etched plate, these progressions would be easier to accomplish. Chances are, this grid will remain unique to this piece and there will be no progression and no taxonomy. I do get carried away with certain ideas that have infinite possibilities. I don't intend to pun, but I do have to draw the line somewhere.It's so hard for me to take a decent picture of black and white drawings. First of all I don't take the time to set up good shots with even lighting, because I always say to myself, "I'll just take it to Jay York" (Portland's art photographer) to get a "real" photo. Also, I want super high resolution images so I can at least have the option of enlarging them to 12 feet wide . The white of the paper never looks white unless I do a fair amount of editing in Photoshop. The drawn area itself is 14 1/4" by 22", and I really wish I had a flatbed scanner that was big enough.


While drawing that, I noticed this in my window:
And soon after Henry jumped through it and erased it.

Sadness and Queen Anne's Lace

I irreversibly messed up my drawing. I noticed the ink was coming out of the pen more than it usually does, and it left wet puddles that I didn't expect. I smudged a little part and I panicked, wetting it with my spit, then tried to soak up the spitty ink with my t-shirt. It was working. Then I used a pink pearl eraser to get the faint grey areas off, then I wiped the pink eraser bits off the paper and that's when it happened. It was still wet and it smudged like crazy. I was sad and angry and then I pretended not to care. I should probably have a plan of action for mistakes, but I don't. I just plan to not make any, a method that is surprisingly successful except when its not, and then I cry.
I'm looking at plants in more detail than I used to. I checked out a plant biology textbook from the library so I can get my learn on. I'm mostly interested in the arrangement of plants' molecular and organ structures, which have informed my work forever, I think. I can also dissect them without remorse or disgust, and they stay still so I can take photos.

more is all around

I finished an ink drawing on Independence Day that I've been working on for what seems like all of time. It's hard for things like this to not finish anti-climactically, but it takes a long soaking period to decide for sure whether it's crap. Working for so long on it, keeping focus and not going astray is a fairly good indicator IMHO (LOL) of its worth.

On a more colorful note, we decided to go to the land for the 5th , just to see what was going down. It had rained moments before.

The mosquitoes and flies were going nuts for the CO2 coming out of our car's exhaust and our mouths. I went wandering in the woods. I came upon a porcupine that started to climb a small pine tree when I approached. He moved slowly and deliberately, like a sloth I saw on the TV once. Unfortunately, the sun was behind him so the picture of him could be any random blob in a tree.

Collages

So I've begun taking photos of objects that are easily accessible to me and my plan is to turn them into fantastic scale-free collages. This is one of my side projects that apart from the actual erasing of backgrounds isn't too time consuming. In the future I may turn them into Monty Python-ish animations, but the goal at this point is to amass a pile of clip-art objects from my own life and set up interesting impossibilities that aren't just rivers flowing inside churches.

This past weekend we went up to 'The Land' in Farmingdale, where we camped it up with the Sylvains on Hutchinson Pond. Our first wedding gift was an acre of land abutting the Sylvain's 4 acres deeded to us from Kate's Mum Debbie. Yay! We're very excited. There are beautiful hardwood trees, swampage, frogs, snapping turtles and countless other things to keep a wannabe naturalist like myself busy. I found some diseased raspberry plants that were beautifully disgusting. I found ferns growing in every direction. Baby spiders were huddling on a leaf for safety. Suzanna and Johnny made a teeter-totter out of a dead tree that I pushed down. I found loads of carnivorous sundew plants.