11 February 07
Clones
When I worked for an architectural firm in Cambridge, Mass, in the late 1980s, a lot of the young architects had studied at Harvard. They had survived the gruelling critiques by the then prima donna, an eccentric Argentine called Jorge Silvetti (“Jess: but it is veddy veddy oggly”) and were coming to terms with churning out HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) systems rather than designing the masterpieces they were probably all capable of but would never have the chance to do, because architecture is highly political and without an in to where the money was, their work was doomed to oblivion. They were affable and seemed resigned to the huge student loans they’d struggle to repay for decades.
They taught me a lot, though, these talented designers, apart from the late 20th century Boston vernacular and how to play softball. (And, incidentally, how to love the Red Sox.) They taught me that you could tell that someone had studied graphic design at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, simply by looking at their portfolio. (You can use any typeface as long as it’s Helvetica.) I later came to learn that you could tell any calligrapher who had been active in Portland in the 1980s: styles coalesce regionally around one or two top practitioners.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this: it’s been going on a long time. The eyes of figures in Giotto’s paintings are what they are because of where he was and who he sipped wine with, as much as who taught him how to paint and his own genius. Early Renaissance Sienna brings to mind a certain look. There were the masters and the students, but there’s an identity inherent in the school.
How this is different from a disturbing trend I’m seeing now in book arts is hard to pinpoint. But the way, now, the de rigueur way to make an artist’s book, is this: you take all your pages, you smother them with acrylics (leave no white space visible, on pain of being labelled facile); you then take vintage photographs, which you cut up in “disturbing” ways (hands; feet; eyes) and paste onto your acrylic ratatouille, and then you paste arbitrary newspaper clippings on top of that and other clip art and maybe some rubber stamping and slather some more muddy acrylics on and there you go, you’ve made some art.
Except for this: all of these pieces are identical. They will be found 100 years from now and someone will say “Scrapbooking School, ca. 2006, artist unknown.”
Will someone please explain to me a) how this happened and b) how it’s just a fad that’ll over by next Tuesday, please?
10 February 07
Now Indexing The Universe
No longer content to gulp all this world’s textual materials into its maw, Google is turning its eyes heavenward and partnering with 16 universities to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The 8.4 meter aperture LSST features a 3 gigapixel camera and will make a complete scan of the sky over Cerro Pachón, Chile, every three nights. Soon we’ll be able to read blogs from Epsilon Eridani b.
9 February 07
January Drought Over
Our ditch is full of water. Today’s supposed to be rainy and very windy. I’m heading into Sacramento with some friends to go to the Crocker Art Museum. We’ll be sharing the road with about 2 million other people who, deprived of snow during the month of January, need to make up for lost time. Many dollars will be transferred to orthopedic surgeons this weekend…
A trip to the library last night: Danny Gregory’s Creative License was in the new book section! If you’ve never drawn anything past the age of five, or if you have but got discouraged by comments from teachers or peers or parents or siblings, pick up this book and pick up a pencil (or, even better, a pen, the easier to free yourself from the tyranny of the eraser). I promise you, you won’t regret it.
When I sit and sketch or draw — on a curbside, as on Sunday next to a spectacular flowering quince while most of Davis was watching the Superbowl — I get so absorbed I go into a sort of trance. About five people I knew walked or cycled by while I sat there, and each time I looked up at them with a glazed expression, not helped by the fact they were mostly backlit by the sun, apparitions, almost. There is no better therapy for me. The overwhelm of the sumptuous color, the figuring out its complement in order to render shadows (for this coral, turquoise); the sexual pumping of the bees, never sated, plunging themselves again and again into the heart of every blossom; the audible yet still invisible arrival of an Anna’s hummingbird, displacing the bees momentarily from their copulations with flowers, finally peeking at me through twenty spikey stems: bliss. Whether or not the drawing or sketch is any good is almost irrelevant: the act of sitting, slowing down, really looking — it’s probably the closest I get to meditation.
I’ve been finding lots of good sketching and drawing blogs lately. Making a Mark is eye candy for devotees of the colored pencil, and the current collaborative online Van Gogh project Katherine’s involved with is definitely worth a look; Lori over at Chatoyance sketches freely, passionately, capturing wonderful expressions (which, of course, is all of them: when you’re working with people, every piece of them becomes an object of wonder, worthy of attention); I receive Julian’s Postcard from Provence daily; Aussie calligrapher Graham McArthur has a spectacular blog, Eidolon. Trumpetvine Sketchblog features Martha’s incredible instructions on how to eviscerate a Moleskine planner and turn it into exactly the kind of sketchbook you want. (We ran into Martha at the December San Francisco Sketchcrawl and got to see this beautiful creation in action.) Illustration Friday grows each week with more and more participants.
Grab a sketchbook: everything’s fair game. Next worldwide Sketchcrawl: Saturday, March 17. I’ll see you out there. (Or inside: today’s not such a good day for outdoor sketching here in Northern California.)
PS: At right is an almond blossom I drew for Jennifer, whose birthday is today (February 10) and who is dealing with freezing temperatures in Sweden: Happy Birthday, dear Jennifer! The original’s on its way…
7 February 07
Five Years, 135 Blocks
We at the Yolo Audubon Society are planning to start a breeding bird atlas project for Yolo County, commencing in 2008. A breeding bird atlas is a set of maps that show the distribution of where every bird species nests, in this case in a set of grid cells across a single county. A breeding bird atlas project takes place over several years, often five — the idea is to confirm the breeding status of each species across the entire time period. A standard grid cell size is 5 × 5 kilometers, which works out to about 135 grid cells across the county. At about 15-20 hours of effort per grid cell, we will have our work cut out for us!
6 February 07
Valley Oak Potting Party
Jim (pictured at left) says that even though it’s an El Niño year, it was a very bad year for acorns. He had to go beyond Lake Berryessa to find a stand of oaks with a lot of acorns. But once he did, he collected about 1,000.
He delivered about 250 to Tree Woodland; another 250 to the Audubon Farms program. That has left him with about 500 to plant. Oaks put out fearsome taproots that require a lot of length in a pot. Gallon milk cartons are ideal. Jim collects these from the cafes all over town, gets donations of compost.
Today we were transplanting the germinated oaks into their milk carton+compost homes. Jim’s kitchen is now a nursery. But this rate of success is high: about 5% loss at each stage. Better, though, by far, than just plonking acorns in the ground and hoping they grow (about 5% survival rate, there).
4 February 07
Davis Flyby
It’s not an event that can be predicted to the precision of a lunar occultation, but sometime between 1:52 and 2:20 PM on February 20 the cyclists racing Stage 2 of the Amgen Tour of California will be entering Davis on the way to the finish in Sacramento. This 115-mile stage starts out in Santa Rosa and makes a couple of difficult climbs across the Coast Range mountains before descending into the Central Valley for the 45-mile flat run to the state capitol building in Sacramento. Some of the world’s top teams are in this year’s race — Credit Agricole, CSC, Rabobank, T-Mobile, Discovery, Quick Step — all passing within several hundred yards of where I work. I just better not blink!
3 February 07
Further Adventures in Colored Pencils
My Derwent Coloursofts arrived this week. A beautiful set of 72. I decided to avoid intermediate quantities based on reviews by Bob and Katherine.
I’m quite familiar with how Prismacolors function. There are some super-creamy ones, such as Indigo, Canary Yellow and Tuscan Red, that glisten off the pencil onto the page; others, such as Vermilion Red, seem to have been made with micah and won’t leave a trace on the paper without a lot of effort, without almost scrubbing the color into the paper.
The Coloursofts are, in general, much chalkier than Prismacolors, but are very smooth. Their waxy bloom is slower to grow. The result is a little brighter (see apple on left as opposed to right).
I tried working at the Farmers’ Market this morning. A drawing of this size takes a long time, and people were constantly moving in and out of view, barring the cooperative gentleman in the black vest. It’s better to have an obvious sitter or obvious photograph to work from.
The cats, on the other hand, spend a long time in each position. I was able to do this drawing this morning, in Prismacolor. Black cats are hard to draw and this black was a combination of indigo and tuscan red with a little burnt sienna thrown in. (The warm colors are on top as the cat was close to me, not further away, in which case I’d have done the routine the other way around.)
This sort of discussion seems so arcane when most people around me are talking about megapixels, digital Nikon lenses, and the need to buy external hard drives. I am pondering relative softness of leads and the long, slow, buildup of layers. It’s a different world.
(Note: all the paper used for these drawings was Canson Mi-Teintes, wrong side.)
1 February 07
First Morse Code Contact
It was hardly to New Zealand or some other far-off place, but we have to start somewhere. Yesterday evening I set up the radio and antenna on the 40 meter band and began my routine. The two simplest ways to make a contact are tune around and listen for somebody calling CQ — that is, announcing to the world you’re seeking a contact — and reply to them, or to call CQ yourself and hope somebody replies to your own call. I had been doing a good mix of both when I put out yet another “CQ CQ CQ DE KG6KDJ KG6KDJ K”. And I’m gobsmacked when somebody comes back — loud. I don’t quite catch his call sign but reply in kind, very nervously and with lots of mistakes. He slows way down to accommodate me. The first thing I say to him is that he’s my first HF (high-frequency bands) contact, before getting to the basics of name, location, and signal report.
His location turns out to be Davis also, about three miles from here. We get into a good long ‘rag chew’, at the raging pace of about 5 words per minute. He is incredibly patient with me, despite my keying going to pot due to nerves. I definitely did better with my listening than sending. After an hour or so we say our goodbyes — 73s in ham lingo — and I go off the air. The experience was fun and nerve-wracking at the same time. And it gets easier from this point on.
31 January 07
Raising Hell for Molly
Molly Ivins is dead after a long fight with cancer. In her final syndicated column, Stand Up Against the Surge, dictated because she could no longer write, she reminds us: “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”
Her editor Anthony Zurcher has written a moving tribute here.
What will I do? What will you do? What will we do for her memory, and the memory of the dead in Iraq, and the memory of those who died, recently or long ago, risking their lives or at least their comfort to do what was right?
I write this as a beautiful set of colored pencils sits on the counter, waiting for me to use. Time for some more subversive calligraphy, methinks… last time I did that on Feathers of Hope, the blog was put under military surveillance. Ha. Go ahead, guys, you’re welcome here…
30 January 07
Loss Of A Topiarist
If one takes a hard look at the hedges on the far side of a campus parking lot bordering 1st Street here in Davis, one will notice that they have form. One is a dragon, another a whale. There are other topiaries scattered around Davis — a locomotive, an elephant, and others.
Sadly, the landscape artist who created these topiaries, George Sommerdorf Jr., just died Friday in an ice-skating accident up at Donner Lake in the Sierras, breaking through thin ice. Davis will miss his sense of whimsy.