Ant vs. Pistil

I was out by our mailbox a few days ago, and I noticed that ants really enjoy the primose. Then I noticed this one guy who had his head down in the hole, and the part of the flower that sticks out of the hole -- the pistil, I learned -- was rocking and rotating. I watched for a minute, and realized that the ant was probably trying to chew through it so that he could get at the nectar behind it. I looked around at the other flowers and saw that more than half of them had their pistils detached and sitting on the petals next to the holes. This was evidence that what this ant was doing was routine work for his tribe.

I ran and grabbed the camera, and managed to film his moment of triumph.

Car painting in its nearly (99.8%) complete form

 

 

North Korea and the Axe Murder Incident

You know, I don't often use bad language on this blog, but I just have to make this comment: Craaaaaaazy shit.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe_murder_incident

 

I don't recall hearing about his before. Just thought I'd throw it up here, Korea being in the news so much and all.
 

 

The Car Painting (update)

 

It is nearly done!  I stopped last night around 12:45 (this was my third night in a row of staying up past 1:00 a.m., and I'm starting to feel it).  There is one small area that needs a tiny bit of detail work. After it spends the day drying, I should be able to polish that off in about ten minutes.

 

However, I made the mistake of bringing it in to work with me today.  That means I'll be spending the day looking at it, finding more things to do.  I already spotted one thing I could correct.  It's not something super obvious, I think, but it's hard to tell.  After spending so much time staring at it, it becomes very difficult to tell what works and what doesn't, which mistakes are glaring to a casual observer and which are merely wickedly haunting my second-guessing right hemisphere.

 

I think it looks really good, though.  I'm pleased with it.  I even signed and dated it last night.

 

Figuring out how much time I've spent on it is very hard.  I kept thinking, "I'm probably getting close to fifty hours," but I started thinking that twenty hours ago, at least.  Fifty hours would be a very conservative estimate.  I don't think I hit a hundred.  Seventy hours worth of work is probably about right but really I just don't know.

 

Photos will follow in a few days.

 

I should also add that rubbing a cut garlic clove onto the surface of a painting does, in fact, seem to curtail the beading problem I was having.  Now the painting smells like garlic.  I'm sure it will fade before too long; but in the meantime, Lynette, if you're reading this, and you're not a garlic person, then…sorry.

Bad Astronomy

Bad Astronomer Phil Plaitt wrote an interesting post explaining why the Moon tends to look notably bigger when it is on the horizon:

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/13/why-does-the-moon-look-so-huge-on-the-horizon/

 

He includes this photographic illustration of a Ponzo illusion.  I think this is really amazing.  Look at the two vertical red lines in the photo.  How much longer does the one on the right look than the one on the left?

 

 

 

(Note: I'm sending this post in via email, and when I do that, I don't know where the photo is going to end up in the post.  Sorry if it's placed confusingly.)

 

Another item from the Bad Astronomy blog:  This is a really cool photo from a guy to takes lots of really cool photos.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/18/iss-shuttle-transit-the-sun/

 

 

Painting and stuff

For a blogger that is supposed to be at least partially blogging about art, I sure haven't put up many photos in a long time.  I've been painting pretty consistently on the car, though, and I'm close to being finished with it.  I painted for another hour-and-a-half last night.  I need to let the whole painting sit for a few days so that it's dry to the touch, then I can put what might be the lat layer of glazing on it.

 

This has been an educational process; I have done relatively little work in oil glazes before, and I've never before done a single painting that depended so heavily on glazing.  Thank goodness for the Internet; I've relied on articles and discussions to help me work out the bugs in the process.  Once again, Wetcanvas.com was a reliable, entertaining resource.

 

One problem that I have had is with some of my thin layers of glazed paint beading up on the preceding layer.  I learned that rubbing the lower dried layer with a cut onion or garlic will prevent this from occurring.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

 

I am also working on another walnut ink house drawing commission.
 

 

You smell delicious!

I think I'll invent a line of fragrances called Grill Scents.  They'd probably work equally well for men or women.  The flagship fragrance would be Tangy Barbecued Chicken, but Jamaican Jerk and Sizzling Steak would be on the shelves with it.  For those who adore subtlety and love anticipation as much as they love payoff, I'll include Freshly Fired Briquette.

 

 

Considering the others

 

Kim and I have failed to locate our Sony digital camera.  It has been missing for more than a week.  We've lost cameras before, but never in such a seemingly confined amount of space and time.  We had it in my parents' van on Wednesday night, and that's the last time we saw it.  After we got out of the van, we got in our vehicles, and drove home.  When Kim looked for the camera the next day, she couldn't find it.

  

There just aren't many places it can be.  We looked everywhere we could think of, and in most cases we looked there three to five times.  I still think there is a good chance it will turn back up.  Maybe it fell behind something at a weird angle, or…that's about all that's left I can think of.

 

We decided we still need a camera while we wait for ourselves to find the missing one.  So Kim bought a little Canon camera.  It's tiny and very pink ("I'm sorry," said Kim, "it's the only color they had left.")

 

I read the small owner's booklet a couple of nights ago, and came across this sentence: "CAUTION:  Do not point the camera at very bright objects (the sun, etc.) Doing so may damage the sensors."

 

I'm intrigued by the "etc."  "et cetera" is Latin for "and the others," and the general modern meaning is that there are others things of the same sort that, for the sake of brevity, aren't listed.

 

So, in other words, it is inadvisable to point the camera at the Sun or other things of that sort.  That made my mind race. What are those other things?

 

First I thought of lit candles.  They are hot, and they are bright.  However, I've never seen a candle as bright as the Sun.  It seems unlikely that anyone would market a $160 camera that would break if it were used to photograph a child blowing out birthday candles.

 

What else is like the Sun?  The Moon?  It's not nearly as bright; it hardly ranks as a celestial birthday candle.  Did you know that the Earth's moon has one of the lowest albedos (abilities to reflect light) in the solar system?  If you lined up all the planets and moons and shined light on them, our moon would be way down at the bottom of the scale.  It's a very dark object, and just looks bright to us because it is so big and close.

 

So, I don't think that the Moon is one of the things meant by "etc."

 

Obviously, stars would have to fall into the category of things similar to the Sun.  Upon careful consideration, though, this doesn't seem to work very well in the context of the owner's manual.  Humans as a rule are only allowed to photograph stars from a great distance.  They are fainter in appearance than the Moon.  I feel that it could not possibly have been the intention of the technical writer of the owner's manual that you should not point your camera at the night sky and snap a photo.

 

This "etc." could serve to warn off lawsuits from NASA several hundred or several thousand years from now.  If scientists prepared an interstellar probe and decided that the philosophy of "faster, smaller, cheaper" meant that a small Canon digital hand-held would be the best choice for imaging technology, then it could spell trouble.  The probe would spend centuries crossing the gulf between us and Proxima Centauri (not a particularly bright star, by the way), point itself at the star, and fry itself.  Another NASA fiasco to frustrate the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of the same engineers who forgot to convert their English measurements to metric on that Mars probe that crashed a few years ago.

 

All this strikes me as unlikely to have been in the mind of the writer of the owner's manual.

 

Another theoretical way to get close to a star is to be abducted by aliens and brought back to their home solar system.  People are always trying to get good photos of UFOs, after all, and a well-documented close encounter of the third kind would be worth a good amount of fame and money.  I don't think this kind of event really ever occurs, but maybe the technical writer is a believer, and he doesn't want someone burning out their camera's optics before snapping some great shots of the Grays, spacecraft interiors, and alien cloning operations.

 

After these considerations, it struck me: The most likely item to fall under "etc." is a nuclear blast.  That has the brightness of the Sun; it can and does occur here on Earth; there are probably lots of people who would try to photograph one if it occurred near enough to see and they had their cameras in their hands.  The warning would be wise to heed for those people who want their cameras to be intact to record the effects of post-Armageddon firestorms, nuclear winter, and rampant hair loss.

 

After thinking of this, it occurred to me that similar energies can be released on a smaller scale and in more tightly controlled conditions during particle physics experiments.  The newly started Large Hadron Collider in Europe might do this.  Grad students, make sure you read your tiny hot pink camera's manual before hooking it up to your research project.

 

That's all I can think of.  Therefore, the camera's manual could read, "Do not point this camera at the Sun, at alien suns around which you may orbit, or at nuclear explosions.  Do not attempt to use this camera to record data for high-energy particle physics experiments."

 

This would certainly make the manual more interesting to most people (not to me; I fill in all those boring blanks myself, obviously.)  There is, however, value in just leaving it as "etc."

 

lunch time detecting

I metal detected very briefly at lunch today—about 20 minutes.  This time I stopped at a park on the way back from getting my allergy shots.  I found a quarter, two dimes, two nickels, and four or five pennies.

 

 

lunchtime detecting

 

 

I detected for a little while at lunch again today.  I was headed for a spot I'd found that had produced a few little interesting things before, but it was being mowed by groundskeepers, so I headed to a quiet spot, way out of the way.

 

I hoped it might be an interesting place, because it is just across the fence from that old military academy.  I looked along that fence line for a while, expecting to find nothing, and finding exactly that in spades.  I found a Coke can, an old tiny bit of iron fence, and a metal disk that isn't a coin (I'll wash it off, but it looks featureless and aluminum).

 

Despite the lack of anything remotely resembling treasure, I had fun, as it was a beautiful day to be out.  I was under some sort of trees that bore fragrant white flowers, and the ground was full of violets, and it was neither too not nor too cold.

Friday at the Oaks

Thanks to our generous friends Candy and Will, who are giving us some tickets they can't use, Kim and I are going to the Oaks on Friday with Jenny and Spencer.  We still have to figure out some logistics (What will we wear? Who will baby sit?), but we're looking forward to a fun day.

 

I am currently taking bets on the success of my bets.

 

 

Book Report

 

A couple of nights ago I finished reading Watchmen, by Alan Moore and David Gibbons. I'd had a number of friends recommend it, but not being a graphic novel type of guy, generally, I'd never got around to reading it.

 

Last year I saw the movie, and though it wasn't great, it was interesting and enjoyable. Then last week when I was at the library I happened across the book, so I checked it out.

 

It really is a good book, and very interesting.  More than anything else, I was captured by the cleverness of it; the layering of words and pictures, the creative juxtaposition of images, and the thoughtful development of parallels within the story telling allowed for a lot of fun, involving reading.

 

Curing

Here's a painting tip I recently picked up: Don't keep your painting in the dark if you want it to dry.

 

I already knew that oil paint dries by oxidation, so that exposure to circulating air speeded drying time.  I also knew that keeping the painting in a relatively warm place increased the hardening of the paint.

 

What I just learned, though, is that exposure to light (especially to ultraviolet light) speeded the process, too.

 

UV light is harmful to paintings overall, but a little sunlight won't hurt it when it's curing.

 

I had been keeping my car painting in the dark garage between painting sessions, but today I decided to take it out and put it in the back of the car for the day.  Maybe it will be dry enough for me to work on some more tonight.
 

 

Bearing the Aesthetic Candle of Truth

 

I spent a long time thinking that artists shouldn't be allowed to title their own artwork, but now I have to file that notion under "misguided" along with the idea that poets shouldn't be allowed to read aloud their poems.  The truth is, in my opinion, that most people shouldn't be allowed to title any artwork, and most people shouldn't read poems out loud in public.

 

The poem thing came from the handful of people in my creative writing classes years ago who tried to read their works for class but it all just came out sounding wrong.  It was too formal and halting, with unnecessary pauses at the end of lines in poems, and a deadly montone.  Bleh.

 

My belief regarding artwork comes from cornball titles such as (and I'm just making these up to give you the idea) "The Lone Sentinel" for a painting of a lighthouse, or "Old Faithful" for a drawing of a rusty old wrench, or "A Little Slice of Heaven" for a painting of a flower garden.  I usually want the painting to speak for itself.  If the title is going to be evocative, I want it to avoid cliché and tell me something I didn't expect.  Otherwise, I just want it for identification purposes.

 

That's what I use titles for, identification.  Uh-oh, I just realized that my block print of garlic is titled "Garlic Lovers."  Well, heck, sometimes it's hard to resist being cute.  But at least it's not a chronic affliction for me.  At least I was shooting for a double meaning.

 

Don't give me a hard time about this.  I know some who read this will want to do so.  I don't favor taking away people's rights to title their own artworks.  I'm just brandishing my right to say a huge percentage of titles are aesthetic poison.  I find "The Lone Sentinel" much less interesting than "Montauk Point Lighthouse, March."

 

By the way, I just Googled "Montauk Point Lighthouse" to see if there was one, and there is.  I figured there had to be.  It's very pretty.

 

Modified Hauck's

This is the same drawing I put up a while back, but I modified the borders. I made them all even because I thought it would really look better. In order to do that, I had to repair the ink drop that fell into the sky; this I did with a little white acrylic paint.

MGA Roadster oil painting work in progress

I wanted to wait until I was done before I started putting up pictures on my blog, but I haven't had any art to post in a long time, so I thought I'd put up what I've done so far. Here are four stages of the painting. The last one was taken this afternoon. I worked a little more on it this evening, mostly on the pavement. The biggest remaining challenge is going to be evening out the reflections in the body of the car. I need to make it a little more uniform, and downplay a lot of the contrasts. I'm pleased with how it is progressing.

Avalanche on Mars

This is from NASA's orbiting HiRISE camera. I saw it mentioned on The Bad Astronomer's blog. Such cool stuff!

I edit this to add: This photo is of a 2,000 foot cliff, seen from almost directly above. The white at the top of the cliff, at left, is ice--frozen carbon dioxide. The camera took the picture just as there was a rock slide down the cliff, stirring up a big plume of dust. This camera has captured other slides as they happened or shortly after. I think it's really neat to see such clear photos of geological processes happening on other planets.

Coughing, painting, sky watching

It's sort of a yucky day.  I've had a cold, and the night before last I was up half the night coughing. Then last night I was up until 1:45 painting, but I probably wouldn't have been able to sleep had I gone to bed earlier because I was still coughing. I finally went to bed, and couldn't get to sleep for an hour because of the coughing, and because my mind was preoccupied (I think sometimes cold medicine does that to me).  Then I woke up again around 3:45 because the smoke detector battery was going dead, making the detector beep.  I was awake for a while after that.  Then I got up when my alarm went off at 5:45.  And I still have my cough.

 

On the good side, though, I feel that I'm making great progress with the car painting.

 

At 6:08 this morning I went out back to watch the International Space Station go over. It's a fairly regular thing, but I thought it would be nice to go out and wave.  It was very bright.

 

 

Garden

 

I finally managed to get a lot of seeds in the ground last night- fennel, spinach, peas, and green onions.  I still need to plant the mustard spinach that Judy shared with us, and I suppose I could go ahead and plant some corn; there's still a danger of a freeze, but the current extended forecast looks pretty good.

 

Topics

 

Art:

 

I was up late painting a picture of a car. It is coming along well, I think. This is a commission. I normally would not do a painting of a car.

 

I have way more ideas than I have time to work on. I'm sure this is a problem that lots a people would like to have. However, it makes it hard to decide what to do next. That is sort of being decided for me, though, as I have one more commission in the wings and a prospective landmark-drawing business opportunity coming up.

 

Last night I had a great idea for a series of lino block prints. It would be fun to do five or six images of Adam and Eve. I have images in my head of Adam and Eve playing poker with a unicorn and a monkey; Adam chasing the snake with a hoe; that sort of thing. Eh, maybe not.

 

I have lots of very old oil paints that are artist-grade, and which came from a yard sale or something fifteen years ago. Some of the tubes of paint are obviously much older than that.  The paint seems to be in decent shape, but the tubes are terrible. They are falling apart, the caps are stuck on, the labels are unreadable and crumbling, and sticky linseed oil coats them. I need to find some containers to put them in, I think. Baby food jars seem too big. I might have some small plastic containers, but I don't know how suitable the plastic is for storing oils. I doubt there would be a problem, but I'd have to mull it over a bit longer.

 

 

Garden:

 

The girls have planted flower seeds. Some of this is supposed to be a secret kept from their mother, so if you are Kim, forget you read this (that's a joke. Kim already knows, and just pretends she doesn't).

 

Today I bought some more seeds: fennel, green onions, spinach, peas, and two types of sweet corn.

 

Helga gave us some bee balm and two other types of perennial, the names of which I forgot. I also can't remember what she said they look like, so there'll be all kinds of garden surprises.

 

 

Coins:

 

No news to report for months and months.