I had a little phone interview today, and as most interviews do, it made me wonder “what the heck have I been doing with my life?” My career trajectory seems plausible - until I have to articulate it. Then I wonder how I got here.
In honor of that strange feeling of 30-something disorientation, here’s a dryly amusing video summarizing life as a series of graphs, arrows, and Venn diagrams. The format’s gotta be just as valid as a resume.
There is a common denominator that links all these artists. It is the profound joy that all feel who observe the natural world with a sustained and devoted intensity.
- Sir David Attenborough
I was tickled to see this charming Telegraph article on a natural illustration exhibition entitled “Amazing, Rare Things” (beginning March 2 at the Queen’s Gallery, Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh). I was even more tickled to realize it was written by Sir David Attenborough. His nature documentary series, like The Living Planet (1984), had a huge impact on me as a child. Even now, if I visualize the concept “ecosystem,” I see not empty savanna, but David Attenborough in the savanna, wearing his genteel exploratory khakis, whispering or shouting depending on what sort of fascinating creature he was stalking.
Even when he was being sandblasted or frozen or heckled by lyrebirds, Attenborough always seemed genuinely delighted to be there. That’s why his words above, about nature artists, ring so true. The late Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, gave me the same impression; it’s tragic that his career was only a fraction of Attenborough’s long tenure. It seems fitting that Terri Irwin introduced this touching, often hilarious 2006 NTA tribute to Attenborough (Part 1; Part 2). It includes some wonderful black and white footage of the naturalist as a young man. I never even realized how much I loved Attenborough, until I watched this.
When I was a graduate student, I fed crack cocaine to mutant fruit flies. I don’t think they really enjoyed it - they convulsed and died. But even so, I was moved by nostalgia when a friend sent me this fabulous YouTube video.
Just pretend it’s David Attenborough narrating, and enjoy!
You may have already seen this, because it’s been uploaded to YouTube several dozen times. It turns out there’s a story behind that. Check out this article by director Andrew Struthers on the wacky perils of internet film release.
Sorry no art postings recently - I have a portrait commission and some applications to do before I can get on with the creativity. Right now I’m going through a collage phase, so you can expect some of that - it’s not a technique I normally use, but I’m enjoying it a lot.
When you’re working with found materials, it constrains and guides you in unexpected ways, which is paradoxically very freeing. (I, like many others, become slightly paralyzed by unlimited options: see this New Yorker book review if you don’t believe me).
Anyway, I just ran across this new U2 video, which represents the collage sensibility quite well. Plus, it’s fun to try and name all the classic and contemporary musicians in it.
To complement the disturbing stuffed animal theme of the previous post. . . the video for “Pretty Dress” from Seattle singer Rosie Thomas. Her new album, “These Friends of Mine,” was released yesterday.
Perhaps it’s just that it’s 4 am, but this video haunts me with unusual pathos. I think I ought to go to bed.
Yes, I’m excited about this film. I know it’s getting mixed reviews. I don’t care. If you feel the same, here’s a contest courtesy of Firstshowing.net. Hurry; it ends Dec. 2.
My friend at Harvard sent me the link to this stunning animation. It portrays a number of biological processes, from translation, to diapedesis, to microtubule depolymerization, to (my favorite) vesicular transport along the cytoskeleton. It’s fun just trying to name all the molecules appearing in the panorama before they’re gone.
The video was created by John Libler and his team at XVIVO. It’s been around since last summer, but I somehow missed it! Amazing work.
I wasn’t all that excited to see Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Fountain until I started reading press about the film. An article by Steve Silberman in the November 1 issue of Wired briefly mentions the father-son team, Peter and Chris Parks, responsible for the effects:
Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge.
This is already such a delightful scene - kitchen alchemy, with Victorian prisms, no less - that it was nearly too much when I discovered the Parks’ studio is a 400-year-old stone building in the Cotswolds. How could this not be good stuff?
It turns out that Peter Parks has already won three Academy Awards (1982, 1987, 2004) for his technical contributions to film arts. He also worked on the Superman movie with Chris Reeve. In an interview with Jennifer Hough, Chris Parks said,
My father and I are known in the business for being able to create a unique kind of special effect. This latest project was a sci-fi movie where the director, (Darren Aronofsky) wanted to move away from digital effects to something more organic and real.
You can view the Fountain trailer here or here. I can’t say the plot sounds completely sensible, but the cinematography is beautiful. The effects I see in the trailer (alas, they only give us one full-length version) do look organic. And there are many more images and short films at Chris Parks’ own website which are pretty amazing, if a little grainy (which could well be the image file resolution - the larger trailers seem less so).
One of the problems with digital art, and a reason I shy away from it myself, is that it’s hard to generate organic randomness digitally. I love spontaneous textures, and in traditional media like watercolor, they’re pretty simple to create with spatter, salt, water, wax resist, or pairs of pigments that react in unexpected ways. It’s far more difficult to discipline the randomness than to generate it.
Good digital artists can also create random textures (textures that appear random, at least) but paradoxically, it takes a lot of effort to make it look unplanned. When I hear that a movie has “bad” effects, I think of scenes that are just too clean. We are disturbed by something unnaturally smooth or symmetrical, even if we can’t articulate what the giveaway is. Perhaps because our brains devote so much attention to them, faces may be the hardest effects to convincingly synthesize - check out this Wired News article by Clive Thompson on the “uncanny valley” where photorealism begins to seem downright creepy!
That’s why I love the idea of the Parks’ work. They don’t have to reverse engineer reality, because their effects are reality - microrealities captured photographically and substituted for larger, nebula-sized events.
Incidentally, the Parks team has made a reputation for their BBC-style nature documentary photography, but Chris Parks, who has degrees in both design and engineering, seems to feel the need to keep the “science” label off his more artistic efforts. From the interview: “I want people to approach the paintings like they would another piece of art, rather than as a scientific photograph.”
I don’t see any reason why they can’t be both, but I can understand where he’s coming from. I guess that’s one thing the Parks’ effects and digital effects have in common - trouble qualifying as mainstream “art.”
I’m eager to see if my own brain accepts the Parks’ art more readily than the recent uncanniness of Superman Returns. And I hope this means that ten years from now, The Fountain won’t end up looking dated in the embarassing manner of other, once-state-of-the-art films. Of course that’s assuming The Fountain is good enough that people will still be ordering it from Netflix ten years from now - which depends much more on director Aronofsky than the Parks. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
