I found these cute bevaled square canvases in a pound shop of all places – so using acrylics I painting a mottled background using stippling. I then used a very liquidy metallic lavender that comes with a dropper! I dropped paint on the canvas and then used the ‘wronge’ end of the paint bruch i.e. the wooden handle to scratch the paint outwards to make flowers. I then painted magenta stalks in. I wanted it to be a diamond mount and painted it as such.
I love seascapes and have done ever since starting Secondary school at about 11 when the art teacher I later had for GCSE’s set me the task painting the abyssal plain. At the time I had just watched the film The Abyss and there were documentaries on TV about fish that glowed with their own light. I would then later spend time in my paleo-biology lectures and the like drawing seascapes on letters to my friends.
Anyway – this one is built up from dots! And it took an age. It is felt tip.
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This picture is drawn with felt tips, I wanted to represent the teaming world of just below the waves. The squid is there because I like squid 😉
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This is one of my seascapes that I love drawing – I wanted to build the picture up organically. It is drawn in felt tip.
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I love dragons but they appear in such diverse ways through out our different cultures and I know that say the welsh for dragon means worm – so I set out to draw a worm like dragon.
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I think there may already be a photo of this picture on the blog somewhere – but it is just a sort of chimera picture. Something from another dimension, something we have trouble understanding. To see a larger image simply click on the picture.
I love my seascapes and this picture was me thinking about how corals and things would grow in a mathamatically precise world – or say coral in LEMs world of robots. For a larger image just click on the picture.
Done in fine liner – this is my representation of an alien – dessicated and shriveled by a harsh atmosphere. If you want to see a bigger version of the picture simply click on it.
Cheltenham is famed for its festivals and has a Science Festival ironically as I am a trained scientist (geology) I found out about the Science Festival last year from a poet!
This year there was an ecological art space organised with the Environment Agency where the Biologist and Artist Dr Lizzie Burns and her friend Matt where helping people explore the natural world through art. Getting children especially or so it seemed to me! to think about the world and our impact of the environment.
My little girl had a great time painting our garden onto the big white column just outside the Environment Agency Cafe. I had to label things as being 3yrs old some of the things were not that obvious. There were pots of clay and a watering can of water to make a ‘paint’ out of the clay and then lots of paint brushes!
Lizzie said it was great to work big like this and I felt it contrasted very well with Matt’s seeds – he had a table with different types of seeds on it – wild banana, seeds that float on the sea, a tub of 20 different tree seeds and so on. He then gave the children the option of making seeds out of clay themselves or drawing some. There were two colours of clay red/brown and white clay.
There where lots colouring pens and things avaliable for the children to colour there seeds and decorate them if they wished – my three year olds seeds were basically clay blobs with no colour on them but hey she tried 🙂
I am myself known (on twitter at least! plus in various poetry and science groups) as the Artistic Scientist or the Scientific Artist – you choose because I can’t/wont! So I was very excited to find someone who not only is trying to cross the percieved boundaries between these two areas but is being active and successful with it. She runs workshops on lots of fun things using art to interest people in science and to explore science giving it back the sense of adventure that is often lost in modernity.
She also makes fantastic molecular jewellery which is an idea me and Ella (Chemist come writer/poet/photographer) during our undergraduates but we never got around to doing anything about it – the closes I got is making tertiary and quarternary structures out of my wire working and thinking about protiens :). Lizzies work is bueatful and she embroiders ties and things.
If I had more money than I currently do I would get some of the jewellery for Ella as a congratulations presant on completing her PhD! (Ella if I ever get out of debt name your molecule!).
My Geo-Vases are probably the closest I come in the visual arts to this kind of thing (not sure that loo roll hubbles and pompom comets count!).
I have unfortunatly ended up in hospital recently but this turned out to be quiet a creative thing to happen – first off I ended up writing poetry and a short story for my duaghter and then I scetched an idea of the view from the hospital window (drawing with a canular in is a bit of an issue as bending arm is not really ideal :/). It was a sketch of what was there as such but the bits of the landscape I wanted to keep for a future picture and possible story. In biro in a reporters note pad – and its not very good!
But it also ment I got to see my Art teatchers work – Gloucester Royal has a lot of art and stuff lurking I assume to cheer up the staff and patients – in one of the main walkways by the reception there is a section of wall that is pieces of plaster moulded into various shapes – including two feet places above the end of a wooden bed sted – giving the illusion of a plaster patient asleep inside the wall.
The 3D topical relief on this piece of work lent it a depth and the plaster casts where of various things like stethoscopes, and vials, plus a doll and her foot steps 🙂 He’d told me in class that he had turned up at the hospital with bowls of sand and mixing stuff for the plaster – set it up on tables and then got passers by to stick objects into the sand and gently take them out again. He then poured the paster of paris in to the impression in the sand. Eventually it hardened and he took out the casts – they are coated in sand most of which he brushed off leaving a little to bring out the definition of the finer detail of the object.
Obviously a lot of the casts weren’t any good as they had bubbles and things in them and Mark said some of the things people decided he should try and cast couldn’t really go up! :/ But he viewed it as a community project and I personally think its one of the best pieces of hospital I have seen and as I’ve used to go to Chelsea and Westminster hospital that is saying something!