Ephemeral

A little while back I was planning a small series of work to send to The Art of Silver, a gallery / shop in Cullinan (here's the Facebook page). Anyway, they wanted skulls, and flowers, and maybe other things, but definitely skulls and flowers. So I was thinking, which is dangerous, because often I start thinking and forget to stop, and then I don't do anything because I'm thinking about it too much. And then a bit later I was in the bath reading a book about ancient Greek philosophy (you can tell I wrote this entire blog post just to let you know that I read Greek philosophy in the bath, can't you?)

And I read that the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the idea of permanence. What, if anything, was permanent? And what was transient? And I jumped out of the bath yelling "Eureka!" and made that the theme of this series.

Now, I know skulls can be seen as a bit morbid, but try not to see it that way when you look at these pictures, if you can help it. I know that to be Serious Artist you need to deal in death, mutilation and sex, preferably all at the same time, but these skulls and bones aren't supposed to symbolise death except indirectly. My work with skulls is informed by my background in archaeology, and usually refers to the past and what remains of it.

Here the skulls and bones represent permanence in the material world, and more broadly, non-living matter. The whole series is about the question of what is more permanent: the material (represented by the bones) or the immaterial (life, and the patterns passed on in the genes). The title of the series is "Ephemeral".

Covenant

That's what this first one is about; the title refers to the "covenant" that non-living matter enters into (yes, anthropomorphising here!) when it agrees to come together for a while in set patterns to form a living creature. The rabbit's hipbones are the non-living matter, and the flower represents life - I used the most ethereal and fragile-looking one I could find. The arrangement of the flower making a division between the two sides of the animal refers to the Ancient Near Eastern tradition of formalising a covenant by cutting an animal in half longitudinally and walking between the halves. After the duration of the covenant is over, the life sometimes leaves its imprint in the non-living matter, in the form of bones that remain, and that may then become fossils which are even more permanent. It seems that the question is resolved, and that non-living matter lasts much longer than life does. But what about the descendants of that rabbit? In all likelihood, they will still be living and reproducing (like rabbits) long after those bones crumble to dust.

Temporal

Ha ha, I made a pun. I have a sad addiction to the lowest form of humour. "Temporal" means having to do with time, temporary, not eternal. But it also refers to the sides of the head (up there, the sticking-out bits behind the eye sockets.) The watch is set to 5am (the "eleventh hour") of antiquity, and the alarm hand to 11, in honour of the last minute before the deadline - the only time I ever do anything. That is not an exaggeration.

Arrangement

"Arrangement" - I have arranged the bones neatly and formally, in reference to the way the molecules of non-living matter are arranged according to the blueprints of DNA to temporarily form a living creature. I wish I had a more creative title!

Prey (Ambition)

I've left my favourite till last. This one is about the other way that the matter making up a living creature gets recycled (cue Lion King music here). It is a tribute to the display in the Ditsong Museum of Natural History that has a taxidermy owl posed on top of a mountain of all the birds, rats, insects and so on that one owl eats in a year. I think it's a year, I haven't seen it for a while. The museum was the ULTIMATE TREAT for me when I was a child, besides the zoo of course. I still remember clearly how my parents let me choose what we would do for some special occasion, and how buzzing with excitement I was at the thought of going to the museum! Anyway, this is an African Scops Owl, and he was a little bit over-ambitious thinking he could eat a whole rabbit by himself. I just love his little face to bits! I want to do more owls. 

Anyway, that's it for now. The last 6 in the series are much more closely linked; it's just one still life viewed from different angles over time, and I will make them another post.

Animal, vegetable, mineral

Animal, vegetable, mineral

Another world


Microctenopoma ansorgii

Collection I


Collection II


Cyclamen

Drimiopsis


Impala / lily


Motivated


Nature morte


Star map I


Twinspot

Out of the Attic: Morpho butterfly

This is one of my favourite OOTAs, but sadly it doesn't scan as well as I would have liked! That's because it's another of the very mixed media pieces that I can't resist doing. This one is oil pastel / pencil / ink. The oil pastel is heavily diluted with turpentine to make something that feels a lot like watercolour but doesn't buckle the paper. Pencil over that goes on very dark and looks great - I used it for the shadows on the flowers. It wasn't quite dark enough for the black bits of the wings, though, so those are permanent marker. Looks wonderfully black in person, but scans a bit too matte in comparison with the other media.

The white and coppery markings in the black are also ink, this time those lovely Pentel rollerballs. Remember Milky Pens and then all the spinoffs? My aunt once gave me a giant pack of them, but once they ran out I couldn't afford more. And now I can't seem to find them anywhere - lots of other brands, but not the Pentel. And I only trust Pentel.

The angle of the butterfly looks a bit awkward, doesn't it? I copied this wholesale from a (not-online) photo - if it is your photo, drop me a note so I can credit you! These days I'm very particular about working only from my own photos, or stock from people with generous terms and conditions, or adapting things into unrecognisability. (Is that even a word? If it isn't, it should be.)

Land art

So far my only attempt at an art form that I love unreservedly when anyone else does it.

 
It was made in Lower Sabie in the Kruger Park, from fallen coral tree blossoms. Here they are on the tree:



And a wider view.

Solanum jasminoides on a book page

This is actually my third attempt at this technique, which basically amounts to layering painted tracing paper on pages from a copy of The Little Prince that got eaten by my dog, and then accenting it with cut out bits. The reason I'm showing it to you first though is that I'm not 100% happy with the way it turned out.


The balance between realism and simplification in the Solanum jasminoides isn't quite right, and this makes it look naive instead of stylised, which was what I was going for. I do like the three-dimensionality of it though, and I'm very happy with the cutout birds.

A new subspecies. Science!

Phytotaxa just published an article with one of my illustrations in it. It's a new subspecies, Euphorbia melanohydrata subsp. conica. This is the most complicated pen-and-ink drawing I have ever done - most of the time you can get away with just doing a little branch of the plant, but with this one I felt I just had to draw the entire thing, because it is absolutely surreal - like a baby Martian Christmas tree. The article is open access, so you can read the whole thing here.




All those tiny fractal branches and subbranches and live branches and dead branches and flowering branches were so much fun to do. As were the roots. And trying to describe the shape of the plant itself using only branchlet shapes for shading.




A bit of a closeup.

Did you know you can get your latest new-species news on Twitter? I'm not really a Twitter person, but this does strike me as slightly absurd in the best sort of way, so I'm all for it. Here's the Tweet that introduced the world to baby Martian Christmas trees.

My plant tree

My biggest project right now (nearly finished!) is another textbook/notes sorta thing, a lot more technical than the first one. I now know more than I ever thought I would want to about the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain, and I've spent hours and hours drawing tiny little cells undergoing meiosis and mitosis. On the good side, I can feel my brain expanding. On the bad side, the results aren't really what you'd call decorative.

One exception is the picture I'm showing you here. It's an illustration of "subdivision of kingdom Plantae" (that was my brief, the rest was entirely up to me. Told you my brain was expanding.) I could have just done a tree diagram with the names of the various divisions, but then I thought "tree diagram, har har" and made an actual tree diagram, with examples of plants from every division growing out of it. I'm hoping it will help the students to envision the relationships between the plants better than a plain wordy diagram would have done.



The copyright for this diagram is going to be transferred to the Tshwane University of Technology.

Ink landscapes

And here's what I've been up to. At least, a bit of what I've been up to.






















These are going to be decorative fillers for a book on, I think, the flora of the Highveld.




















They were originally just going to be simple little doodles.



I guess you could say they grew on me.


The second-last one is my favourite; I'm rather proud of the water reflection.



Now I have to go and draw some more.



P.S. What's worse than breathing in an unidentified insect?

Chrissiesmeer photos, part two

The one evening we went frogging. Frogging - it's like blogging, but with more frogs.

That was awesome. There's not much I like better than running around in a swamp chasing small animals. Kind of like all the best parts of my childhood.

Also, cows:

And this gorgeous crablet I found climbing through a ditch in search of these:

(We were both in the ditch. I think I was the only one interested in the pineapple flowers, though.)

Chrissiesmeer photos, part one

Even if you live in these parts, I think, it's quite likely that you've never heard of Chrissiesmeer. Here's how to find it. Grab a map, and look just left of Swaziland. If you're on Google maps you'll start zooming in and there will suddenly appear, or coalesce, a scattering of lakes like a little blue rash - or perhaps, more poetically, like the Pleiades. West of Mbabane, north-east of Ermelo, south-east of Carolina.

It's very... countryside. Most of the time if you head off into the wild blue yonder, you're going to the bush, but this could never in a hundred years be called bush. It's grassland, wetland, pine plantations, farms. Countryside.

Rode on those horses around that lake at what felt to me like a flat-out gallop, although it was probably only a brisk canter. There were seven horses and although only four had riders, the others kept up with us anyway so it felt exhilaratingly like riding with a herd of wild horses, thundering through the long grass and reeds at the water's edge.

In the foresty area we saw a few shy duiker and a pair of new-to-me buck which I think were possibly reedbuck. It's such a treat to see an animal you've never seen before! All of them were too quick for my camera, sadly. But Chrissiesmeer is mainly about flowers and frogs. Oh, the flowers!

Why, yes, that is a couple of the fattest, healthiest Agapanthus inapertus you have ever seen, with a Eulophia leontoglossa orchid (yellow) and Brunsvigia natalensis in the background just for good measure.

And yes, that is a frackin' great field of the same agapanthus. What is this I don't even.

More botanical madness to come, but I'll leave you with this picture of the sweet pups belonging to the guest farm where we stayed (I highly recommend it). The border collie is my favourite, as he has heterochromia and can keep up with a herd of wild horses, but the pointer reminds me of Nosy in this book so I adore him (her?) too.

Two little weeds

While digitally cleaning up and labelling a lot of the drawings from my last project, I realised how much I like these two. They aren't particularly spectacular, just a couple of weeds that I dug up from the garden to show the difference between monocots and dicots. But there's just something about them. They look... poised. I like them.

Out of the attic: Himalayan blue poppies

This is not just a really old pastel drawing of Meconopsis betonicifolia, known as the Himalayan blue poppy - it is also a testament to my enduring and painful love affair with plants I can't grow. I'll set my heart either on something that should grow in much cooler climates, and obsessively stack ice cubes around it to try and make it flower (take, for example, the Great Peony Disaster of 2009), or else something that may not, under any circumstances, encounter frost, and spend all my time protecting it. I have to say the latter approach works better - my impala lilies, for instance, not only are still alive but flower most years. I think it goes without saying that I won't be trying to grow Meconopsis betonicifolia any time soon, as those in the know say that if you live in a climate where you can grow tomatoes, you can't grow Meconopsis. But that doesn't mean I'll stop yearning for them.