Queen of Decay
watercolor on paper
. . . .and I painted this a few years ago when I was in a similar mood.
It’s amazing how paint and paper can trap a state of mind. Fall is a mercurial, frangible, profligate season, vibrant with colors that trumpet their own decay. Corruption is color. Madness is color.
To paraphrase Yeats, things fall apart. The summer cannot hold.
7 comments November 2nd, 2007
fallen cicada
watercolor, 2007
‘Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada, not only a corn-crake. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.’ - John Berger
During my first month in this apartment, I heard cicada song outside my windows constantly. It woke me in the morning and grew almost unpleasantly loud in the evening. I grew so used to it, I’m not sure when it stopped, but I realized today that the trees are silent. Adult cicadas have short lives - perhaps shorter than the time it took for me to (finally) finish this painting.
This is one of the fallen, viewed through the porthole of a microscope: such a small, homely thing to make such a large song.
Until next year, then. . .
1 comment October 21st, 2007
Fly Away Home
Watercolor
Three of my watercolors appear in the new Fantasy Illustrator’s Technique Book 
Giving your audience the unexpected is a large part of fantasy art. This painting’s title, Fly Away Home, is punningly reified as one end of the mobile home gradually breaks down into a flock of birds. It’s more than a clever visual trick. The narrative effect comes from the question posed to the viewer: At some time in the past, did a flock of birds become the mobile home?
To which insightful question I can confidently respond, “What?”
I respect authorial intent, especially my own authorial intent, and honestly, punning reification never crossed my mind once while doing this piece. But such a flattering gloss must be authoritative, don’t you think? From now on, I will enjoy saying “I really reified that one, didn’t I?” with great solemnity.
For those who like context, here it is on the page, heading up the “Fantasmagoria” section - the bottom painting, Arboreal Pachyderms, is by none other than Tom Kidd. Good company is such a treat!
My only nitpick is that somewhere during scanning, digitizing, sending files across the Atlantic, and printing, the color saturation got bumped up to “screaming.” In person, the paintings are much calmer, translucent, watercolory. I’ve tweaked this file to better reflect what I see when I look at the painting. Probably I’m the only one who would notice the difference, but hey, that’s my punningly reified baby there.
Here’s the link:
16 comments July 2nd, 2007
Bee and Echinacea
watercolor, 8.5″ square
2007
A few weeks ago, I asked a beekeeper at the Portland (Oregon) farmer’s market whether his bees were ok. “Yeah, they are,” he said, “but I get that question a lot.” On Saturday a Seattle beekeeper told me he’d “had some losses” but added soberly, “it could be a lot worse.”
Since colony collapse disorder (CCD) broke out last November, as many as a quarter of our domestic honeybees (Apis mellifera) have disappeared, abandoning hives full of food and larvae. Some beekeepers have lost up to 90% of their hives. Since the adult bees don’t return to the hive to die, it’s impossible to say what killed them; the few victims left behind display a confusing variety of pathological problems, such as a digestive tract clogged with undigested food, elevated numbers of normally harmless pathogens, and discolored tissues. Weirdest of all, opportunistic scavenger species and bees from other hives won’t touch the abandoned stores of honey. What do they know that we don’t?
From a agricultural perspective, it’s a pressing question. Not all crops require bee pollination, but over 100 do, including almonds and many fruits. The bulk of a beekeeper’s own income is derived from renting his or her hives for pollination services, not from honey production - the Oregon beekeeper I interviewed said with a smile that he barely makes any money on honey. California’s almond growers have begun outbidding other industries for the services of beehives, because there are simply not enough to go around - and that was before CCD kicked in, decimating the bee supply in some regions of the US.
• View a narrated slideshow about CCD and the industrial side of beekeeping (NYT)
Depending who you ask, possible causes of CCD include GM crops; malnutrition (poor pollen quality/availability, or poor supplements provided by keepers); unusual numbers of common parasitic mites (varroa); a virus; funguses (a new, more infective strain of Nosema); poor genetic diversity in domestic bee strains; cell phones (or cordless phones - there seems to be some confusion); and pesticides (usually neonicotinoids). Whatever it is, it’s global - Canada and Europe also report losses. France, after serious hive losses several years ago, banned some neonicotinoid pesticides, but continue to lose bees anyway. Australia is largely ok; some US beekeepers have replenished their stocks with Australian bees.
• recent LA Times review of the situation (June 10, 2007)
One (somewhat) comforting hypothesis is that CCD is actually old news - a periodic disorder that has happened before, and will clear on its own. Intermittent seasonal losses have been reported since 1868, in both the US and Europe; the occurances were given names like “dwindle disease”, “disappearing disease,” and “Isle of Wight disease.” In some cases, a putative cause, like fungus or unusual weather, was blamed; in other cases the problem simply went away without any likely cause being found (Underwood and van Engelsdorp, 2007). So will CCD just go away? Hopefully, but no one’s counting on it.
Agricultural practicalities aside, there’s something gut-wrenchingly wrong about CCD. A fundamental piece of the ecosystem is being leached away, and we have no idea why. I’m reminded of the epidemic of frog deformities a decade ago. Despite frantic experimentation by ecologists and developmental biologists, it was never solved (the most likely culprits are trematode parasites; but pesticides, habitat loss, and UV radiation probably contributed to the problem). Will a similar complex of interlocking causes be found for CCD? Will we be able to cure it, or will we just have to wait for it to diminish - as we did with the frogs?
More:
MAAREC Colony Collapse Disorder homepage
CCD Working Group Preliminary Report
7 comments June 20th, 2007
Last weekend I discovered Seattle’s Gas Works Park. By accident. And ended up on a tour through the derelict gasworks - led by the park’s designer, Richard Haag. The structures are fenced off, so I got the impression this was an unusual privilege. Fortunately my camera’s battery wasn’t completely exhausted, though I was torn between taking photos and listening to Haag recount his efforts several decades ago to convince the city that the industrial site could be bioremediated. Among his persuasive arguments: growing a nice crop of tomatoes in what was thought to be dead soil.
A former refinery that converted oil and coal to gas, the plant became obsolete in the 1950s, leaving the ground beneath saturated with tar and aromatic hydrocarbons. It was one of the first toxic industrial sites to be successfully reclaimed for public use through bioremediation (although it is still monitored, and intermittent cleanup efforts continue).
My first reaction was WTF?!? How could I know nothing about this extraordinary place? I am so impressed with the city of Seattle (and Haag) for maintaining the towers in their rusty steampunk glory, instead of leveling them, as the original plans for the site demanded. Out of 1400 such gasification plants once operating across the US, this is the largest remnant left standing.
From the park outside, the gasworks now resemble a gigantic modern sculpture with a fashionably distressed patina. The unreal blue-green of the Seattle grass contrasts so strongly with the red rust that it stings the eyes. But in among the towers, the scene is ghostly. Blackberries twine lushly through the iron girders, obviously undaunted by any lingering contamination in the soil. Small piles of bleached bones, perhaps from rodents or birds, litter the ruins. Only a few dangling loops of slender T1 cable, probably from a security system, betray that the Internet Age has supplanted the Industrial.
Although the refinery is barely over 100 years old (and despite its rivets and cogs, not properly “steampunk” at all), rain and benign neglect have left it seemingly ancient, like a half-exposed fossil. I hope these images capture its aura of timeless decay.
15 comments June 18th, 2007
Galactopod
2007
Watercolor on Winsor & Newton Paper
My friend Seth and I have been mailing art back and forth for years. I don’t remember how it got started, but in the past year or two, I’m pretty sure he’s sent me art three or four times with no reciprocation. I’m a bad art friend. To make it up to him, I had to do something dramatic. And what’s more dramatic than a gigantic, vaguely alien-ish cephalopod brooding in the inky blackness of space?
2 comments January 24th, 2007
morpho ishihara
watercolor on Winsor & Newton paper, 2007
The Ishihara pseudoisochromatic plate series is still the most common clinical test for colorblindness. Most Ishihara test plates are pointillist circles containing an Arabic numeral, which should be visible (if a little eye-popping) to a normal viewer, but only weakly visible or invisible to a colorblind individual.
Ishihara plate 12.
Those with normal color vision should read the number 16.
Those with abnormal color vision should not see a number
or read it incorrectly.
So what do butterflies have to do with Ishihara plates? Complex butterfly wing patterns, like Ishihara numbers or traditional television screens, are an illusion created by many small units of primary colors. When we interpret the dots as gradients, shapes and complex patterns, we use both color information and light/dark information about each dot. For colorblind individuals, the light/dark information is (mostly) normal, but the color information is off, and they have difficulty resolving a shape based on color alone.
The three general types of color vision deficiency are protanopia, deuteronopia, and tritanopia. In each condition, one of the three retinal systems that distinguishes the three primary colors of light (red, green, or blue) is compromised. Tritanopia affects blue cones and is quite rare. Protanopia and deuteronopia affect the cones that process red or green light, and are usually both called “red-green” colorblindness. Protanopes and deuteronopes still see red and green - they don’t find apples or tomatoes invisible, or black-and-white - but they can’t tell the difference between red and green. Instead, red and green shades (along with orange and yellow) appear as the same muddy ochre color. There is also a fourth, very rare type of colorblindness - total colorblindness, or monochromacy, in which all cones are missing (achromatopsia) or only one type of color cone is present. These individuals do not see “color” as we understand it at all.Most “colorblind” individuals are not complete protanopes or complete deuteranopes. They may have only a partial deficiency (protanomalia or deuteranomalia), and may not even be aware of it. The first paper on colorblindness was written in 1794 by a red-green colorblind scientist, Dalton (yes, the atomic theory dude). He compared objects of different colors and found that his observations differed radically from his colleagues’:
that part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light. After that the orange, yellow and green seem one colour which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow.
Red-green colorblindness has been generally called Daltonism in his honor, but there was some question about the specific form Dalton had. In 1995, Dalton was finally proven to have deuteronopia - by DNA testing of his preserved eyeball. Eeuw! (Dalton himself had suggested it be saved for further study - now there’s a scientist for you).
The overwhelming majority of red-green colorblind individuals are men, because the genes for both red and green cone pigments are on the X chromosome. Thus, men inherit colorblindness from their mothers, who usually have normal color vision. Women can indeed be red-green colorblind, but they would have to be unlucky twice over, inheriting a defective allele on the X chromosome from both mother and father.
Although this painting was inspired by Ishihara’s plates, be aware it is not a valid clinical test for colorblindness. It’s a response to the aesthetics of the Ishihara test. But I was interested to see if the numbers would be visible to colorblind persons. Digital algorithms can approximate the different forms of colorblindness by altering the different channels of a digital image file. According to one such simulation, butterfly 1 should be quite difficult for a complete protanope or deuteronope, butterfly 2 less so, and butterfly 3 easiest of all - but harder for a protanope than a deuteronope. Tritanopes should be able to see all three numbers, as could a person with only partial red-green colorblindness. If you are colorblind, let me know what you see!
At least 1 in 12 individuals has a red-green color vision deficiency. Most artwork, websites, and advertisements will appear very differently to these colorblind individuals. Yet it is extremely difficult for an artist or designer with normal vision to anticipate how a colorblind person would see their work. It’s not as simple as rendering the artwork in greyscale, like a black-and-white TV, because the typical colorblind individual, with partial red-green colorblindness, does see an altered color spectrum. If you are not colorblind yourself, consider checking your web page to be sure it’s legible to colorblind individuals. Technically, my blog is non-optimal for colorblind individuals, because I use red on black for links, and red can appear almost black to protonopes. But I’ve tweaked the red to make it orange enough that it should be legible. (If not, post a comment and let me know!)
Because each color pigment gene comes in several different versions (or alleles) and many of us have extra copies of the green pigment gene, even people with “normal” color vision may have slightly different combinations of functional retinal pigments, which could translate into seeing “red” or “green” or “blue” most strongly at slightly different wavelengths. If you’ve ever argued over whether a paint chip is “greeny blue” or “bluish green,” whether grape juice is purple or merely dark red, or whether a fallen leaf is light orange or dark yellow, you know that we don’t all categorize, or even see, colors identically. Working with Ishihara-style patterns stretched my ability to envision the dichromatic palette, but I still can’t imagine what the world is like for a complete deuteranope. Traffic lights, all the varieties of apples, strawberries, fall leaves, roses, red and green peppers, stop signs, blood: color vision is a gift.
7 comments January 15th, 2007
Bishop Berkeley’s Cherry
Watercolor, 2006
Cherries have quite a few interesting literary associations. Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) chose the fruit to illustrate his philosophical conviction that objects can only be known through our direct perception of their sensory attributes:
I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it : and I am sure nothing cannot be seen, or felt, or tasted : it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry.
Thus, inanimate things only exist while they are being perceived - in the mind of the observer. This idea has obvious implications for both art, in which the senses of the observer are manipulated to create a perception of something which is not there; and science, which necessarily proceeds through empirical observation, but recognizes that the subjectivity of the observer is limiting.
Add comment November 26th, 2006
Ah, the mix cd. Its jacket, bland and functional, begs for artistic redemption. In junior high, we collaged magazine photos and doodled on our mix tapes. In high school, I coaxed the primitive tools of a Mac SE to create a series of (grayscale) covers. Now, of course, we have Photoshop, which makes layering & tweaking almost sinfully easy. But this one was done the old-fashioned way, with ink & collage.
This Sinister Yet Surpisingly Perky mix is for my friend Sylvia. That’s me in the pigtails. Don’t I look sinister?
Add comment November 14th, 2006
Aposematism, 2006. Watercolor on illustration board
“Aposematism” is a type of protective signalling mechanism, usually but not always involving bright coloration, that draws the attention of predators. It might seem counterintuitive that potential prey would make themselves more conspicuous, but aposematic prey are defended by stings, venom, foul tastes, or other weapons, and they need to warn predators of that.
A yellowjacket wasp’s bright yellow grabs a bird’s attention, warning that this particular prey can fight back with a sting. A skunk’s stripe warns of a different, but equally unpleasant, defence. Bold stripes, bright colors, and other distinctive patterns help the predator associate the prey animal’s appearance with the unpleasant result. Like someone who gets the stomach flu after visiting a certain restaurant, they will avoid that food source in the future.
Familiar color patterns recur in aposematic animals. Honeybees and yellowjacket wasps both use yellow and black stripes. Although each species’ pattern differs, bees and wasps have successfully collaborated to make their predators strongly associate their shared defense, stings, with their shared yellow and black coloration. Resemblance across different aposematic species is called Mullerian mimicry. The mimicry is arguably more beneficial to the bee, because deploying its barbed stinger has fatal consequences, while the carnivorous yellowjacket can sting an attacker repeatedly and still escape in good health. But both hymenopteran families benefit from sharing one common, clearly understood warning signal.
Unpalatable butterflies and their caterpillars also use high-contrast black and yellow or black and orange patterns (some engage in Mullerian mimicry). Venomous snakes, like the coral snake, are yellow, black and red to warn their attackers off. Tropical poison dart frogs are yellow and black (some with stripes), but also hot pink, aqua, and neon orange. What do predators think of all these bright colors and patterns?
It turns out that chicks tend to avoid black and yellow food, even if they have never come in contact with it before. Schuler and Hesse (1984) painted mealworms with either a conspicuous yellow and black pattern or a drab olive color (created by mixing the yellow and black paint). They found that although newborn chicks would peck at the black and yellow striped mealworms as often as they pecked at the olive mealworms, the chicks did not eat as many of the black and yellow mealworms. Since the mealworms were identical (and harmless) except for the paint, the chicks had no incentive to ignore the black and yellow ones. Schuler and Hesse concluded that the chicks have a native aversion to black and yellow prey based on color alone.
To exploit such predatory prejudices, some animals mimic aposematic coloring despite having no defences of their own. The hornet moth (Aegeria apiformis) is a very convincing replica of a yellowjacket, though like all moths, it lacks a sting. If it’s lucky, the moth’s superficial resemblance to a more dangerous species will protect it from predatory birds. This type of mimicry is called Batesian mimicry. Bees and wasps, who are defended by stings, derive no benefit from the hornet moth’s Batesian mimicry of them. Mimicry can work against the model species: if a predator eats a Batesian mimic and experiences no ill effects, it may learn to doubt the reliability of yellow and black warnings, and begin to eat both defenceless mimics and defended model species. To avoid this problem, hornet moths must be significantly outnumbered by the authentic bees and yellowjackets encountered by the predator.
Coral snakes also have Batesian mimics. There are over a dozen species of American snakes with red, yellow and black stripes that resemble corals, more or less. Batesian mimicry apparently doesn’t have to be exact, just reminiscent enough of the genuine coral to give a predator pause.
The mnemonic “red on yellow kills a fellow, red on black venom lack” helps to distinguish venomous coral snakes, in which the red stripe is surrounded directly by yellow, from nonvenomous mimics such as the Mexican milk snake, with the red stripe insulated from the yellow by black. Unfortunately, this mnemonic is not always accurate. Its usefulness depends on geographic location, and much like the coral snake, it has many confusingly similar variations (”black on red, friend to Fred,” etc). In an episode of Seinfeld, Kramer reverses it so the “red on yellow” snake, the coral, is harmless. (He’s corrected by Elaine.) It also pops up occasionally as “black on yellow kill a fellow,” which is misleading, because black touches both red and yellow in the harmless milk snake. Check this helpful page for photos of coral snakes, some of their nonthreatening mimics, and a good explanation of the stripe pattern.
In evolutionary terms, it remains unclear how a species initially makes the transition from cryptic (camouflaged) coloration to conspicuous, aposematic coloration. Conspicuous prey seem more likely to be seen and eaten than cryptic ones, and it may take a predator several tries to learn that conspicuous prey should be avoided. If there are just a few conspicuous animals in a population, they should be picked off too quickly to reproduce. However, some recent studies modeling predator-prey interactions suggest that predators’ food preferences are complex, and conspicuous coloration may not be the fatal disadvantage it was once thought.
Humans have co-opted the high-contrast color combinations characteristic of aposematism for our own purposes. Warning signs (both traffic and industrial) tend to use yellow, red, or orange in combination with black. The familiar yellow caution tape depicted in this painting is so close to the natural coloration of the yellowjacket, the insect almost disappears against it. Note that this effect is a completely artificial inversion of the normal function of aposematic coloration, which should be the very opposite of camouflage. In the wild, against a background of green, brown, or grey, the yellowjacket would be clearly visible: “Danger! stinger here.”
Although yellow and black patterns do catch our attention, we aren’t chicks. These colors don’t make us lose our appetite (although mealworms might). Quite the opposite - yellow and red are often used with black as color schemes in the fast food industry (McDonald’s, Burger King, Carl’s Jr., KFC, Denny’s, Wendy’s, Taco Time, etc). In a recent article in Voice, David Barringer discusses the conflicting “danger” and “hunger” impulses evoked by yellow and red. One theory is that mammals tend to associate these colors with fruit, and picking them out against a dull background was an evolutionary key to success in foraging. Our eyes became optimized to identify fruit colors, and the colors might have innate positive food-related associations for us. Studies have shown red makes people hungry.
But it’s more complex than that, obviously. We learn simultaneous negative and positive associations for the red and yellow of fire (danger, burns, warmth, cooking); and the black-on-yellow “danger: flammable” sign has different connotations than a yellow-on-black sign for a flame-grilled hamburger. Barringer points out that many of the fast food joints using these colors could simply be emulating McDonald’s mid-century decision to go with gold, and benefiting from accidental association with an already well-known food brand — McDonaldsian mimicry. Yum.
4 comments November 4th, 2006
A yellowjacket wasp. I believe this is Dolichovespula arenaria, the common aerial yellowjacket, which is found throughout the US, particularly on the coasts. This specimen very thoughtfully died on my front steps a few weeks ago, when it started getting cold at night.
Rendered in transparent watercolor on Aquarius II paper.
1 comment September 26th, 2006
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