The Aegis of Athena, painted leather, 2011
I’m working on some art to do with Athena, a painting and outfit which echo off each other. Here as part of the outfit is the Aegis of Athena, the shield with the head of the gorgon, Medusa. It’s made of heavy leather, cut, curled, and glued into place, and painted with acrylics. Some of the paint is interference gold, which can only be seen from certain angles. The holes along the edge are to fasten it to the rest of the outfit.
Scientific Illustration: A Guide for the Beginning Artist, by Zbigniew T. Jastrzebski
Zbigniew T. Jastrzebski was a scientific illustrator at the Field Museum of Natural History and a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and other area colleges. I took his classes for three years while at the SAIC. He was demanding and precise and required his students to work to their utmost capacities, just as he pushed himself all the time. He was an immigrant from Communist Poland, a child of World War II. He had no relations here save his mother, but he had many, many friends. Continue reading
Star Trek "redshirt" sugar cookies
We actually baked these last Christmas, but since today is the 45th anniversary of the first broadcast of “Star Trek,” I give you the kids’ redshirt sugar cookies. The vanilla ones are humans and the gingerbread ones are Klingons. Note our children’s creative use of the cookies that broke during baking.
We made the gingerbread men into Klingon redshirts
(This is an improved version of an essay I posted on my regular website last year.)
Surprise! A Japanese artist painted this tempera portrait of a Chicago heiress in Paris. Tsugouharu Foujita, Japanese, "Portrait of Emily Crane Chadbourne," tempera and silver leaf (now tarnished) on canvas, 1922, Art Institute of Chicago
Egg tempera is a simple paint. Powdered pigments are mixed with egg yolk and a little water. That’s all. Laid down on a white, absorbent ground, usually plaster-based, they dry into a durable, brilliantly colored, tough film which can demonstrably last for millennia essentially unchanged.
Recently the University of Chicago Press published three reprints from World War II, handbooks for American soldiers sent to Iraq, France, and Britain. The U.S. Army War Department produced them, and the authors and illustrators were anonymous.
When I picked up the manual for France (“Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II,” University Of Chicago Press, 2008), I was shocked and delighted to recognize a Ludwig Bemelmans drawing of a gendarme on the cover. The beloved author of “Madeline” and lots of witty books for adults had illustrated the French handbook! Continue reading
In honor of the Independence Day weekend, here’s a bit of American history.
I chanced across an August, 1918 copy of “Red Cross Magazine” with photographs of the uniforms of women American Red Cross workers in France in World War I. I thought these photos would be of interest to historians, costumers, and medical professionals, so I’ve scanned and cleaned up the pictures and present them here. I’ve also transcribed the captions to make life easier, and included some context.
The clothing shown is simply and conservatively cut, with the high waist fashionable in 1918. It follows generally fashionable lines. Interestingly, the article claims the American Red Cross had just changed the uniform from white to grey because of “the ever-present laundry problem in France,” presumably related to the blighted conditions in the country after four years of total war. Continue reading
I thought I would share some pictures of our fifteen-year-old’s birthday cake. The decorations are Precambrian fauna from the Burgess Shale fossil formations, made out of modeling chocolate. Mostly it’s trilobites. There is one hallucigenia, a pikaia and the head of an anomalocaris hoving into the scene. Continue reading
This is a plug for my husband, Richard Garfinkle, award-winning author of science, science fiction and fantasy books.
Now available for the Amazon Kindle, two novels by Richard Garfinkle: Exaltations, an allegorical fantasy about alternate histories and fictional realities, about the ways the channels of stories affect human thought, and about love, faith, devotion, and the tyranny of quests; and just-released Wayland’s Principia, a hard science fiction novel about human-alien interaction, interstellar travel, and what it means to be human. I provided the cover art for both books.
Samples of the first chapters of each can be found online at Achronal Press, our small press.
You can find these novels on Amazon’s website. Exaltations is here and Wayland’s Principia is here.
Now here’s why you might care to read them:
I originally posted a version of this on a discussion forum, but I also wanted to share it here.
The icon for IgorAnimation for the iPad
My husband Richard Garfinkle, who is awesomely multitalented, has just released an app for the iPad which does 3D modeling, image manipulation, and animation. It’s called “IgorAnimation” and you can find it on the Apple iTunes store here.
For a while the West Town Chamber of Commerce (of Chicago) was sponsoring “Sketch Thursdays”, where Chicago artists would gather at a West Town neighborhood location and sketch for an hour while vistors watched. Then the sketches would be offered in a silent auction at reasonable prices. Continue reading