Maggot Art

As Fred from Floyd is showing interest in career possibilities involving decay-loving creepy-crawlies, I should point out a similar opportunity for those of an artistic bent. Rebecca Bullard, a UC Davis graduate student and a forensic entomologist by training, has created a teaching curriculum she terms Maggot Art. By bathing her maggots in non-toxic water-based paint and then letting them crawl on paper, her dipteran collaborators produce trails which can be surprisingly beautiful. The first public exhibition of these paintings will be held in Davis in April 2004, so now is the time to become a pioneer in this art form.

The Complete Peanuts

The complete run of the Peanuts comic strip—all fifty years—is about to be reprinted. The comics publisher Fantagraphics will be issuing these in 25 hardbound volumes, releasing two a year. I am happy to see that the strip will be republished in its entirety: it’s been a significant enough part of American culture that people will enjoy and learn from the complete set for a long time to come. This news is also a reminder that Pica and I should one of these months make an expedition over to the Charles M. Schulz Museum, not too far from here in Santa Rosa.

Arrival of a Painting

Still life is a complicated and often misunderstood genre, but I have great hopes that it is being revived in a very interesting way by artists like Gainor Roberts, which is why I asked her to do a painting for us as a couple. It is my wedding gift to Numenius.

Click on the image at left for a larger view. Every single element in this painting is a private signifier.

Mudpies

A recent entry from Bright Field on Renaissance Man (dated August 7 — there is no permalink) brings to mind my own struggle with breadth and depth. I compare my creative process to the making of mudpies: you roll up your sleeves, get mucky and have fun, and if what comes out of it is interesting or beautiful you give it away; if not, not. And then you move on to the next mudpie.

I wrote a poem about this last year — calligraphed it, rolled it up into a scroll, tied it with a green ribbon, and handed it out to folks in my writing group at the time: a mudpie about mudpies. I like the villanelle form, not widely used in English (but best known in Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night), because it’s like a dance, a song — and very appropriate to the kind of lightness I’m trying to explore. Thomas, of course, was able to plumb the searing depths of human experience with this “light” form — every time I read his villanelle I gasp. Anyway, here’s mine:

Ars Poetica

I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
I flit from here to there, I breathe it in.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.

Mudpies are shaped in ink, or paint, or clay
Or paper, leather, sewn with linen strands—
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.

If good, or beautiful, they multiply:
Plucked, like August squash, then loved, and given—
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.

Proboscis searching, reaching for the sky—
The canon, though shot down, gnaws deep within.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.

Perhaps the newer gods have a reply:
Express yourself. It’s all the same. Just spin.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.

I wander, search, a light-fingered magpie.
I learn the rudiments but don’t dig in.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.

Walnut Ink

I’ve been learning how to dye fabric. Not in a very elaborate way—the kind you throw in the washing machine and keep the poor thing returning to the beginning of its cycle for half an hour, till all your cheesecloth is a tangled shroud. The fun part, though, has been learning how to dip the ends of the cheesecloth in some walnut ink I made last year (I had three quarts left, which was never going to get used on paper—a small bottle can last three years; it’s a full sepia color).

The walnut gunge just seeps up into the cotton—it’s beautiful, a deep rich brown fading into buff. I don’t know quite what to use as a mordant, a chemical that forces the pigment to adhere permanently to the fibre, though alum and tara (whatever that is) appeared in a Google search this morning. For the moment I’m not worrying about the mordant—just enjoying the beauty of the process.

How to make walnut ink:

1) Run around at least five yard sales till you find a pot large enough (4-gallon canning pots are ideal).
2) Gather as many black (not English) walnuts as will fit in the pot, husks, stems, maggots, and all. Late October is best. The husks should be turning black.
3) Cover the walnuts in the pot with water and soak overnight.
4) Bring the pot to a boil and then simmer all day.
5) Turn off heat and allow to sit overnight.
6) Remove nuts and husks from dark murky liquid, being sure to squeeze out every last drop of dark murky liquid. There is no way to do this without making a mess. It’s very like making mudpies, so you might as well dig in and enjoy it.
7) Bring to a boil again and simmer all day till the liquid is the consistency of Turkish coffee.
8) Run through a sieve.
9) Run through a finer sieve.
10) Run through a stocking.
11) Bottle.
12) Label bottle so nobody mistakes it for hibiscus juice!
13) Without toxic preservatives such as formaldehyde, a mold is likely to grow on the ink over time. Just stir it in. Strain again before using.

The Painting of Place

I went yesterday to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look for some paintings by Ellen Ahrens, a cousin of mine and a student of Eakins’. I failed to find them and was about to leave grumpily when I stumbled into an exhibition of the work of Warren Rohrer.

Here is an artist whose sense of place-concretely Christiana, a Mennonite town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania-informed all his work. His paintings are abstract renditions of light on farmland, whether the hazy heat of June (of which I had first-hand experience) or the still, breathtaking cold light on snow-covered cornfields. Regular patterns across the square canvasses echo the regular lines of ploughed furrows or falling shadows, and the textures in the paint echo husks of corn and rustling hay, waiting to be cut.

Meditative like Rothko or the Amish and Mennonite quilts he grew up around, Rohrer is also playful, particularly with regard to the titles of his paintings (Christiana Boogie Woogie, for instance, shows a very light pink motif overlaying in a subtle way the riotous Mondrian strips beneath it).

It was his very late work that excited me most; Rohrer developed over the years a calligraphic dance from forms he saw in the Pennsylvania fields, and started inserting it into his landscapes in the 1990s.

I love the metaphor: that landscape has its own language. I think of landscapes I know in a more intimate way and try to imagine their calligraphies: what would a levee say if it could speak? I have no doubt about the colors, though, now that I’m back in Davis: ultramarine, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna. It’s hot. I’m home.

The Magician of Walker Hall

I stopped in today to see Dolph Gotelli’s installation at the Design Museum on campus, entitled “34 Years of Fantasy and Play”. Gotelli is a design professor here who is noted for teaching his students the role of fantasy and imagination. The midterm assignment in a course he taught this spring involved aliens invading the quad north of the administration building; each student’s alien was to be at least three feet tall, resemble nothing at all seen in Star Wars or Star Trek, and had to leave Earth by 5 PM the day of the installation. Gotelli is also a collector who would be the envy of any woodrat. He has what is likely the world’s largest collection of Christmas memorabilia, including a suitably ancient fruitcake, and he saves almost all his correspondence, a sampling of which, entitled “Forest of Bureaucracy”, was pinned onto the center columns of his installation.

His motto is “To know is nothing; to imagine is everything.” His students design toys, pop-up books, edible tablescapes, read fairy tales, and profoundly engage their sense of whimsy. And judging from his students’ correspondence, sandwiched between notes from deans and recalcitrant department chairs, some carry this sense with them long after they leave college.

The question I have is why is this sense of whimsy and imagination so rare in the material designs expressed in our culture? Why don’t the sides of automobiles sport gargoyles, or at least something other than a monochromatic paint scheme? Why is there a trend towards ever more restrictive deeds and CC&Rs in housing developments—heaven help if you paint your house in burnt sienna and goldenrod, let alone hang your skirts on the laundry line? Occasionally exceptions break through, such as the 1999 cow sculptures in Chicago, but the exceptions prove the rule.

After all, if you met a large visiting papier-mch dragon or perhaps even a giant squid on your path to work, wouldn’t your heart be lightened a bit?

Foiled by Critters

Earlier this week I was making paper. I enjoy taking old shredded ledger sheets from work and turning them into something beautiful. Actually this was more in the category of paper casting; I was trying to make an impression of a bird’s primary flight feather in paper. This needs a lot of pulp (which takes a while to dry, even here where we’re expected to reach 100 degrees by Monday). Patience, and a dry climate, are very helpful.

So I duly put my pulp-loaded screen outside the front door, hoping it might dry by the morning. Unfortunately, a small rodent—mouse? rat? ran across the wet pulp, leaving its muddy prints on my masterpiece. The alfalfa field just to our south got flooded last weekend providing a smorgasbord of delights for the local herons, egrets, and Swainson’s hawks. I think this rodent was heading north away from their beady eyes, under cover of darkness.

There are other hunters at nighttime around here, though, so who knows what its ultimate fate was. The fate of my paper casting was for me to cover the tracks in colored pencil…

The Dark Arts of Color Management

Getting one’s inkjet printer to faithfully render a digital camera image up on screen is an arcane art, not to be undertaken without the proper incantations. Color management is complicated enough so that it is actually something of a cottage industry: consultants make their living helping clients get the colors of their glossy mail-order catalogues right at the printer’s, and there is a whole armamentarium of software and hardware instruments to help with the problem.

All of which seems overkill for the amateur digital photographer. Entry-level color calibration software packages, such as MonacoEZColor, are still relatively expensive; that is, it seems a bit profligate to spend $300 on software to calibrate a $120 Epson C80 inkjet printer. What then is the poor digital photographer to do?

Searching hither and yon on the web I came across a guide to printer profiling on the cheap. In this technique, you start out with a color target. (Not happening to have a GretagMacbeth ColorChecker chart handy, I made my own, shown above, using watercolor and gouache. Anyway, I know well the color and tints of ultramarine and burnt sienna.) You then print the target out and compare it with the image on screen. Then in Photoshop, you create a curves adjustment layer, and tweak the color curves so that the screen image matches the print. You then invert the curves and apply them, so that the next trial print should be pretty close to the image. Repeat the process to fine-tune. Basically, this technique creates a printer-and-paper-specific adjustment layer that you swap in at the end of your Photoshop work in lieu of an accurately-calibrated ICC printer profile.

I found trying to get the hues to come out right by manipulating the curves pretty difficult so my main emendation to the technique is to use the hue/saturation controls rather than the curves control. My prints are coming out pretty well now, but there is a lot of fine-tuning left to do.

It’s still a dark art, after all.

Other Calligraphies

I’ve always enjoyed watching snails: they are unhurried, they carry their house with them, and their retracting eyes are surely the envy of any alien. They are also among the best of nature’s calligraphers. The dotted-line trail they leave, pictured at right, sends gardeners into a murderous rage, but in its own way it’s lovely, an intermittent aftertrace of the movement of a creature not in haste (unlike the beautiful lateral fury of a sidewinder’s forward/sideways tracks).

Last week I paid a visit to a physical therapist (I had a horse-related injury from January that’s still bothering me). I was given a set of exercises to do: the obvious flexing and circular motions… The third got me smiling: draw the entire alphabet, daily, with my foot! (By the time you reach Z, you’ve gone through every range of motion available to the ankle joint.) Roman, Italic, Uncial, Carolingian, or Humanist? I’m loving it. It makes going to meetings a whole lot more fun.