Empty Night Skies

So I've been overseas for a month and haven't posted since. I have many stories to tell and pictures to show,  but in the meantime I wanted to post about Empty Night Skies, a bat-themed art show in Philadelphia that I have a piece in.

It's opening happens tonight I believe (I'm not good with the time-zone thing) and is being organised by a particularly awesome and talented lady named Jeanne and her (also awesome) partner Mike. The show is a benefit in aid of bats, as the poor critters are dying rapidly in that part of the world and are in dire need of help - you can read more about the plight of bats and Jeanne's reasons for doing this show on her own excellent blog here. You can also see the humbling list of participating artists, which includes the rather incredible Paul Romano whom some of you may know from Mastodon's first four album covers.

I really loved the idea of doing something a little more artistic with this piece, but knowing my rather time consuming working habits and having a really strict deadline before I left for Europe, I figured it might be best to stick with graphite pencil and a straight scientific study from a real bat - a style of drawing I feel comfortable with and that can be chipped away at over a number of weeks. I also figured the chances of someone else having done something similar were slim...here's hoping. You can click these images to enlarge:

detail:

This piece and many other excellent artworks will be for sale at Empty Night Skies, with all proceeds going to Bat Con, and I believe some artists will have prints to buy both at the show and perhaps online. I wasn't able to get prints ready in time for the exhibition, but I will make prints at some point soon and will donate a percentage of each sale to Bat Con. If you're interested in a print, keep your eye on Lepus Luna, and check out Empty Night Skies on Facebook.

 

Amanita print.

Not sure if I posted about this painting on here when I first did it, but it's my first finished watercolour painting of an Amanita muscaria mushroom, and Shaun and I have just made prints of it. You can read more about it and order them from our paypal store over at Lepus Luna. 

The secret teachings of plants.

As if in obedient response to my recent expression of interest in illustrations of plant dissections, my botanical illustration teacher Mali held a plant dissection workshop over the course of three days last week. As it turns out, she teaches them over summer every year; but I'm not going to let that ruin my enjoyment of the coincidence.  I was particularly happy that it would be Mali teaching this course, because I'm extremely fond of her and find her love of scientific drawing contagious. This is an example of an exquisite Boronia painting with dissections by Mali:

Needless to say, I was very excited to be learning these skills and was determined to get as much out of the course as I could. I managed to scrounge up enough pennies for an old stereo microscope that I found on ebay, and swindled a free dissection kit from my kindly vet-student sister Kate. Although was looking forward to it immensely, I actually enjoyed dissecting and observing plants even more than I had anticipated; and despite the fact that I barely managed to dissect and illustrate the inner workings of a single flower over the whole workshop, when the three days were up I was left wishing it wasn't over. Three days of staring at such microscopic detail ended up feeling like three hours, and I felt as though I would need another month to actually complete what I was trying to draw...which amounted to little more than a few pencil sketches and some notes:

Just to deliberately confuse and challenge myself, being the contradiction-loving Gemini that I am, I chose to read a book called The Secret Teachings of Plants on my way to and from the workshop. The book, a gift from my very dear friend Jerome, discusses the limitations of science to accurately describe nature, and specifically plants. Not that the book dismisses science altogether, as it necessarily covers a lot of scientific ground, but it does call into question the sense of certainty that people derive from the process of scientific reductionism. I haven't finished the book yet, but what I read of it served as a nice reminder during those three days that I was merely observing patterns that frequently occur in nature, rather than discovering cold hard facts that were indisputable.

So anwyay, onto what I did during the workshop: first up was pulling apart a lily and bud to see what a fairly simple flower looks like when pulled intro it's various sections. I was rather pleased to be working with lilies, as the ones we used were very similar to the gorgeously scented Stargazer lilies that I had in my wedding bouquet, and that I am familiar with from years of drawing them. As I'm sure many of you have noticed, these flowers have one of the most visible reproductive systems of any plant you're likely to see:

Once we'd pulled them apart and identified the various parts - petals, sepals, stamens, anthers, stigmas, styles...then we got to cut them up and look at them under a microscope. It was pretty awesome. I can't show you any images from under the microscope because mine is a rather old one (there are new digital ones with a usb cable you can connect to the computer), but maybe that's better anyway - all the more reason to draw what I'm seeing accurately so there's no need for photographic documentation. We learned a fair bit about basic botany on the first day, and about how images are sized, scaled and arranged on a page both for scientific and artistic purposes.

On the second day we got to dissect flowers from the daisy family, and happily Mali had brought Echinacea flowers which happen to be another one of my favourites. Echinacea was my introduction into the world of herbalism, a subject close to my heart, and I've always loved the flowers as a symbol of that initiation. Like lots of things I love, I originally thought they were weird and not particularly beautiful at all, which I think is what makes me all the more fond of them now.

 

 

 The reason Mali had chosen daisies for us to dissect is because they're thoroughly complicated, as I soon found out. The really interesting thing I discovered about the Echinacea was that the actual flowers - ie the section of the plant containing the male and female parts used for reproduction - were in fact covering the entire surface of the spiky receptacle in the centre.  This was not one flower, but many flowers combined, and the long orange spines that protrude from each flower are just the bracts. This meant that dissecting one of these tiny flowers in order to find out how it reproduces involved picking one of them up with tweezers and cutting it in half under the microscope. In the cross-section below, each of the orange spines represents one flower, and the halved seeds can be clearly seen at the base of each one:

 

flowers and bracts:

 

  

Each flower was only about 9mm tall and 1mm wide. Below you can see my sketch of a seed on the far left, then a flower in the middle, and a bract on the right, all magnified by 10. I couldn't believe how long it took to draw those simple little things, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was taking more care and spending more time observing rather than drawing because I knew I didn't have the benefit of photographs that I could refer to later.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to take my echinacea specimens home after the class due to current restrictions on plant matter leaving the gardens, but I have them sitting in the fridge at the botanical garden observatory where my classes are held, and I intend to squeeze some more drawing time out if them before they perish. Hopefully one day I'll have time to complete a full scale painting of an echinacea in colour, and with all the dissections and individual parts illustrated also. One day.

Semi-precious

I’ve been experiencing some synchronicity in relation to crystals recently, so thought it was about time I wrote some blog posts about them. Crystals are something I’ve always been interested in, and a large solid sphere of rose quartz that I received for my 21st birthday is among my most treasured possessions; but there’s always been something holding me back from diving head-on into an enthusiasm for these mineral friends. The thing I am referring to will be familiar to anyone who has ever entered a new-age or Theosophical Society bookstore, and was once succinctly described by my friend Jerome as The Purple Horror. As you might expect, one of the best books available on crystals features a cover that suffers terribly from a case of the purple horror - so much so that a friend of mine went to the effort of covering hers with black contact so she didn’t have to look at it ever again. I’m considering doing the same to mine…but in the meantime, I’ve been really enjoying this beautiful King Penguin book from 1952 which features one of the coolest  book covers I’ve ever seen, inspired by the beautiful mineral Malachite.

 

The very same day that I’d been discussing my love of crystal illustrations with my friend Jeanne, who recently included some in a painting she did, a customer of mine brought this book in as reference for a tattoo of jewel that she’s getting. I immediately jotted down the name and found myself a copy on Bookfinder (best website ever), because I really love these scientific illustrations and don’t come across them very often.  My scanner’s not the best so I photographed the most interesting illustrations, all by an artist named Arthur Smith, for you to enjoy.

This first illustration is definitely my favourite.  Something about the combination of the triangular facets of the quartz and the more organic composition of the minerals growing on it just seems magical to me. I have a bit of a thing for this trinity of colours too, pink yellow and blue being visually harmonious variants of the classic primary colours. Also, as Shaun pointed out, with its overlapping triangles it rather resembles a Valknut.

 

Since discovering this book I’ve also been led to a whole host of other crystal art which I intend to share when I have a spare minute. I’ve also been inspired to use the skills I’m learning in my botanical illustration class to do some paintings of minerals that interest me in the same sort of style. First on my list is my current favourite stone, Moss Agate, which is reputed to encourage a stronger relationship with plants among other useful qualities.

Mushroom drawings part 1.

So this is how I spent my day yesterday. Probably close to 15 hours of it.

I had yet another all-day cancellation, and rather than try to find an appointment to fill it at the last minute I thought I’d stay home and draw. And I’m glad I did, because as luck would have it the mailman arrived early in the morning with an unexpected package for me, and it just happened to be an awesome drawing lamp my Mum had bought me with a daylight bulb in it and a magnifyer, which made the experience of drawing in my dingy little room a much nicer experience than it usually is.  Thanks Ma.

I think this is my best botanical drawing yet and it was loads of fun. (This is not a great photo but Shaun will be able to take a nice one later). A very pale, detailed line drawing with minimal shading was done from life in Adelaide a few weeks ago, and then I did the rest of the shading yesterday from reference photos that I took:

 
I’ve taken some artistic license with some of the shading and a few other things, like removing the little tears in the stem near the bottom because I like the ambience of the texture without them. One of the things I’ve really noticed, which is partly why you have to draw from life whenever possible rather than from photos, is that a camera lens simply cannot capture the same information that your eye is capable of taking in at any given time, so the photo references always differ a little from what you’ve drawn.
I think my next Amanita drawing is going to be in colour, either watercolour or coloured pencil. I really need to either get over my fear of paint, or switch to pencils altogether I think.  Either way, I’ll have more drawings to show you soon.

Shell drawing.

This is a sort of Christmas present for my boss Jane, who loves seashells and has been very, very good to me this year. It's a good thing she doesn't read this blog, becaused if she did it would ruin the surprise. Although shells and skulls and things aren't botanical items, they fall under the same 'natural history' umbrella so we can draw them as part of our course if we want. They're nifty subjects in hot weather because they don't wilt and die like plants do. It's a pretty lame excuse, but my scanner really doesn't capture the details of these pencil drawings very well at all...they do actually look better than this.

Anyway...thanks Mama Jane, you're the best.

Botanical Illustration

I took my first ever class in botanical illustration today, at Melbourne's beautiful botanical gardens. I've been somewhat preoccupied with both natural history art and with plants for a while now, and this seems like the logical way to explore these interests. So far we've only done some sketches of gum nuts, but already I get the impression this is going to be a life-time passion, and something that feels natural and intuitive for me as an artist. There's something about the meditative process of observing nature so closely, and the discipline of replicating it as faithfully as possible, that I find really appealing - perhaps because the focus is on the inherent beauty and perfection of the subject, rather than on the artist.

For me, obsessing over how impossibly beautiful something is, whether it's a flower, a melody, a sentiment or another human being, is precisely what inspires me to make art in the first place. The art may not always resemble what I'm obsessing over, but profoundly emotive responses to things are always what inform my visions and stimulate my desire to put them on paper. It's only when my whole being is consumed with that kind of euphoria that I can make art that really feels alive and meaningful. I think this is why music provides me with the most inspiration of all - because as a visual artist it communicates to me in a way that feels entirely mystical and beyond my comprehension.

  

There's nothing nicer than recognising in another person the same creative impulses that I feel, but expressed in a completely different way, and I think that's why I have a tendency to become enamoured with artists who work in formats other than my own. People I find hugely inspiring like David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Justin Broadrick and Emil Amos are all operating from a sincere and deeply felt desire to express themselves, and they do so tirelessly and without compromise. Often it's their approach and dedication to their art that touches me more than the art itself, but the one commonality between them all is their ability to make me feel as though the world is essentially a beautiful place. Looking at some of the botanical art pictured, it's an easy thing to believe.

I scanned these images from a Taschen book called Garden Of Eden which was my birthday present from Shaun this year. Thanks babe.

John James Audubon

John James Audubon was America's most prominent and celebrated ornithilogist, so much so that this portrait of him now hangs in the White House. His dedication to the thorough and accurate documentation of America's birds was (and still is) unsurpassed, and resulted in some truly beautiful images. Audubon was a talented painter and possessed a strong sense of aesthetics and composition, setting his images apart from previous works of a similar kind. He was also a hunter and taxidermist, skills which he used to create life-like images of the birds he painted, always incorporating elements of their habitat and lifestyle such as tree branches, nests, eggs, flowers and associated wildlife. For a lengthy and fascinating history of the man I recommend visiting his Wikipedia page, or one of the many websites dedictaed to his work. Otherwise, just enjoy these examples of his stunning bird paintings, the complete collection of which can be purchased in The Audubon Society baby elephant folio edition of his magnum opus, Audubon's Bird's of America.