tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67123112111236444842024-03-12T18:53:58.085-04:00the ongoing saga of minouetteUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger950125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-91776331338945195412024-03-07T11:56:00.002-05:002024-03-07T11:56:00.142-05:00Triadic Colours, CYMK, Primary Colours, and Warm Colours and My Printer Solstice Prints<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW1gZ1TKNRrXQpqL8tUUWqf_coR6H6EyIuIfdHpnjQPfntwXSGfvUDK6eTD0Q4tiIP-wVjGsycpNjfPad-KUxJr_Pemk-AvI_f23Fe5lA9H9P2kg7DoQd-XBQZ1fQ_0bFkyswS2tJULRhPUwidV9i4CY6-Cp1v8YhTYrJTSu6SkdmDil7lZj3fD87gm0LB/s1365/OchreSeaStarSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Ochre Sea Stars, linocut by Ele Willoughby on 8" x 8" washi paper" border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="1365" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW1gZ1TKNRrXQpqL8tUUWqf_coR6H6EyIuIfdHpnjQPfntwXSGfvUDK6eTD0Q4tiIP-wVjGsycpNjfPad-KUxJr_Pemk-AvI_f23Fe5lA9H9P2kg7DoQd-XBQZ1fQ_0bFkyswS2tJULRhPUwidV9i4CY6-Cp1v8YhTYrJTSu6SkdmDil7lZj3fD87gm0LB/w640-h640/OchreSeaStarSq.jpg" title="Ochre Sea Stars, linocut by Ele Willoughby on 8" x 8" washi paper" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1674691303/lino-block-print-ochre-sea-stars-in">Ochre Sea Stars</a>, linocut by Ele Willoughby on 8" x 8" washi paper</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>For the #PrinterSolstice prompt triadic colours, I choose the secondary colours orange, purple and green, which are three equidistant on the colour wheel. I was looking forward to #InsertAnInvert2024 and needing an intertidal creature.<br /></p><p>My lino block print of two Pisaster ochraceus, generally known as the purple sea star, ochre sea star, or ochre starfish, on a bed of kelp, is hand-printed on 8" x 8" (20 cm x 20 cm) delicate white Japanese paper with bark inclusions. A common sea star, or starfish of the Pacific, it is a keystone species considered an indicator of health in the intertidal zone. Most of these starfish are purple but they can also come in orange (as shown), or ochre, yellow and brown. <br /><br />These were amongst my favorite finds on the beaches of Vancouver Island.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWsshaCAd2NeCSi-A13KCuabM8wQsHU10jsCgTCZSEXQBsnOkf0vTci_dQIDo8ijlUACHksth68l-WqvDXPNzcy4RVGeqYOTDPSgpOgcg8KEMFD74Fa3z8SRS8eU6hVvOmp1bFse2GW3ynTzFQK8lNYKCPt9joIUQNp-Jcf-oiAZQ6nhJlcYYLT8nPmGKv/s1077/Cmyk1sq.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1077" data-original-width="1077" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWsshaCAd2NeCSi-A13KCuabM8wQsHU10jsCgTCZSEXQBsnOkf0vTci_dQIDo8ijlUACHksth68l-WqvDXPNzcy4RVGeqYOTDPSgpOgcg8KEMFD74Fa3z8SRS8eU6hVvOmp1bFse2GW3ynTzFQK8lNYKCPt9joIUQNp-Jcf-oiAZQ6nhJlcYYLT8nPmGKv/s320/Cmyk1sq.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9GiAeK-Su7D-yvrGBiyrQBUEkIu_9n8dugVZGUEHEcaar8LjYkY8SNX6ePLuoLFypNS7OgP8Qc9KTV51e7SoIZVmugVMoUylbI-8nnjIVbtb97HwJbXNU6r6sPsftXvo6sZ-KkrSz3Cn7le_IeLA0AfkqsHDK2Yq3hj_PHFBK1vYji7HWokL_SGS3lVJB/s1080/Cmyk11sq.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9GiAeK-Su7D-yvrGBiyrQBUEkIu_9n8dugVZGUEHEcaar8LjYkY8SNX6ePLuoLFypNS7OgP8Qc9KTV51e7SoIZVmugVMoUylbI-8nnjIVbtb97HwJbXNU6r6sPsftXvo6sZ-KkrSz3Cn7le_IeLA0AfkqsHDK2Yq3hj_PHFBK1vYji7HWokL_SGS3lVJB/s320/Cmyk11sq.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqJ77mYocPO2dbU0M4rOg_csCLu5TW9Zvw9a_3m25bAk540TCGIWau4ydTjsQwaNf-WhRjdWxS1jAzZV5OXutpu8ghWamcyb_lEb7D4YBLaUSuYIjrEut5BHSXWrPHT2HaiDsadKHZcBesH317sadx9DKX6w4d-UdAcmlJ_9RtEl_yq4ezdKwLvDgxZnln/s1235/Cmyk12sq.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1235" data-original-width="1235" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqJ77mYocPO2dbU0M4rOg_csCLu5TW9Zvw9a_3m25bAk540TCGIWau4ydTjsQwaNf-WhRjdWxS1jAzZV5OXutpu8ghWamcyb_lEb7D4YBLaUSuYIjrEut5BHSXWrPHT2HaiDsadKHZcBesH317sadx9DKX6w4d-UdAcmlJ_9RtEl_yq4ezdKwLvDgxZnln/s320/Cmyk12sq.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikG2f6_HoqVUHikUHyQFfVJHlp5NV0Nx6p8D5VQ1uCD4jUnf6ayzerM1uzx0wxRryfkHL_XXt3rLIozKrpVEFmBuzWgBClT2ux_upd-QZk4TAZwHz32oxP8v7DLjUGA_u2LVhCxPimYHLk1gbQzYy_6rwqyB02sq05DYrlzsv4if13eDMyYiIOwiXwKyzU/s1249/Cmyk13.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1249" data-original-width="1249" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikG2f6_HoqVUHikUHyQFfVJHlp5NV0Nx6p8D5VQ1uCD4jUnf6ayzerM1uzx0wxRryfkHL_XXt3rLIozKrpVEFmBuzWgBClT2ux_upd-QZk4TAZwHz32oxP8v7DLjUGA_u2LVhCxPimYHLk1gbQzYy_6rwqyB02sq05DYrlzsv4if13eDMyYiIOwiXwKyzU/s320/Cmyk13.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9m4xFclzlE0pQMSiTr71CUxJivRU6c_09NRPIJqY7CzBqbJSAKR78temgaABsQBbB-Ue1ynFrK8RShyphenhyphen6WwnmxwONRg8tfDjWEhu5EQQbZF0lhJespxtdYGMd7rftvoBOvhS0kyf5-LvEyt2ACImdff45GOW6-t5Sc8MBL7xsXennepf-noUjB7E3nCdrB/s1235/Cmyk14.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1235" data-original-width="1235" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9m4xFclzlE0pQMSiTr71CUxJivRU6c_09NRPIJqY7CzBqbJSAKR78temgaABsQBbB-Ue1ynFrK8RShyphenhyphen6WwnmxwONRg8tfDjWEhu5EQQbZF0lhJespxtdYGMd7rftvoBOvhS0kyf5-LvEyt2ACImdff45GOW6-t5Sc8MBL7xsXennepf-noUjB7E3nCdrB/s320/Cmyk14.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A collection of small gel prints made with cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, cut paper stencils, lino blocks and plant materials<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>For the #PrinterSolstice prompt CMYK I spent a morning experimenting with my gel plate, using paper stencils, lino blocks and plant materials and my process cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks.</p><p>For the #PrinterSolstice prompt primary colours, I thought I would play with adding yellow and red to a cyanotype (which are in tones of blue of course). I decided to return to my idea of contrasting a fractal Sierpiński triangle and the naturally occurring fractal shape of a fern leaf. The Sierpiński triangle (also called the Sierpiński gasket or Sierpiński sieve) is a fractal equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. It's a self-similar sets—that is, it is a mathematically generated pattern that is reproducible at any magnification or reduction named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński. This was a decorative pattern many centuries before Sierpiński. I made a cyanotype of a fern leaf and used a gel plate to add a red circle. I lino block printed the yellow Sierpiński triangle.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8hVAUheeZvS4Svl2kok4jJp_WrYYKiClfzYVNPfJFOCE9uYlVQmYNMA6NcIjdl2Cl8KYVqiWo7N6srwRjFLsIrJj-Lz1_m7-RnDEv0NjRnVTJOu9HK0LDldmBX0-YEwUprHyWjMpKUAKoHI0XXgOQMxMODNGxCMqbWaJAE3QKKPKUQfxnfsNYuDKHdRHN/s2140/FractalGeoCyanSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Fractal Geometry, cyanotype with gel print and linocut, 9" x11" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="2140" data-original-width="2140" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8hVAUheeZvS4Svl2kok4jJp_WrYYKiClfzYVNPfJFOCE9uYlVQmYNMA6NcIjdl2Cl8KYVqiWo7N6srwRjFLsIrJj-Lz1_m7-RnDEv0NjRnVTJOu9HK0LDldmBX0-YEwUprHyWjMpKUAKoHI0XXgOQMxMODNGxCMqbWaJAE3QKKPKUQfxnfsNYuDKHdRHN/w640-h640/FractalGeoCyanSq.jpg" title="Fractal Geometry, cyanotype with gel print and linocut, 9" x11" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1661291158/fractal-geometry-cyanotype-and-lino">Fractal Geometry</a>, cyanotype with gel print and linocut, 9" x11" by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>And for the final prompt warm colours, I looked ahead once again to prompts for #InsertAnInvert2024 and decided I needed to make a true crab.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vSKC3E67OQdwYlqGLgGib1iRQW-B6jff0AA0BanUTTmxMiYY-9O3gBWWhYQwS6OUfFYuz8HTHnTxzzKtFmY6yDgcrT7xF_hHHvtIBEqv4KwJMFtKTGmnRg_7Hce9jil8YRvJ3mqijrVycuk62nTEUBCd322MweTKjP4aOE2uayGz9JN7yKJ_l6i207mz/s1860/FrogCrabSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Frog crab, linocut print on washi paper, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1860" data-original-width="1860" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vSKC3E67OQdwYlqGLgGib1iRQW-B6jff0AA0BanUTTmxMiYY-9O3gBWWhYQwS6OUfFYuz8HTHnTxzzKtFmY6yDgcrT7xF_hHHvtIBEqv4KwJMFtKTGmnRg_7Hce9jil8YRvJ3mqijrVycuk62nTEUBCd322MweTKjP4aOE2uayGz9JN7yKJ_l6i207mz/w640-h640/FrogCrabSq.jpg" title="Frog crab, linocut print on washi paper, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1669803440/lino-block-print-red-frog-crab-ranina">Frog crab</a>, linocut print on washi paper, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> My hand-printed red frog crab (Ranina ranina), also known as a spanner crab or Huỳnh Đế crab, is hand-printed on Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper 8" x 8" (20.3 cm x 20.3 cm) square. This crab is found in tropical and sub-tropical waters offshore Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, the east coast of Africa, through the Indian ocean to the Pacific offshore Japan and Hawai'i. It is the sole known member of its genus and it is fished for its meat. The 5.9" (15 cm) crabs live in 10 to 100 m (33–328 ft) or water, where they bury themselves in the sand during the day and hunt bottom-dwelling fish. Known as "frog crabs", on account of their elongated carapace and frog-like appearance. Their claws are modified into tools for digging, and the body is a rounded shape that is easy to bury in sand. Unlike most other true crabs, the abdomens of raninids are not curled under the cephalothorax, so they are a little unusual looking.<br /><br />Ranina ranina is a regional specialty in some regions of the Philippines where it is known as curacha. It is generally eaten steamed as halabos, or cooked in coconut milk as ginataan. In Vietnam the species is named as "Huỳnh Đế crab", literally means "emperor crab" as it has been a favorite high-ranked cuisine of historical Vietnamese monarchs hailed "monarch of all the crab".<br /><p></p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-64628189539985967572024-02-28T12:05:00.001-05:002024-02-28T12:05:09.466-05:00Mussels and Chitons - New marine invertebrate prints<p> Looking ahead to some #InsertAnInvert2024 prompts, I made some linocut marine invertebrates.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipWXMnHaC853T5ERWDPch3MWy7KZ46RaPwFiHAngWveOux4Cdl5SPEk8B2eqqTpjPK3ldgVjPRQ4Xi-Jx7W7IDUDtZgfBgSWRIV_Drq5jLJP6FP31Fw4EvnGR2v7tGWnh9Z3QYMwRVt_KYekwEb3_cO9CezlMf7mJVLbNeyBR4cLMP79k-Hecmsx6mJJ1l/s1350/BlueMusselSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Blue Mussel, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1350" data-original-width="1350" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipWXMnHaC853T5ERWDPch3MWy7KZ46RaPwFiHAngWveOux4Cdl5SPEk8B2eqqTpjPK3ldgVjPRQ4Xi-Jx7W7IDUDtZgfBgSWRIV_Drq5jLJP6FP31Fw4EvnGR2v7tGWnh9Z3QYMwRVt_KYekwEb3_cO9CezlMf7mJVLbNeyBR4cLMP79k-Hecmsx6mJJ1l/w640-h640/BlueMusselSq.jpg" title="Blue Mussel, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1671612100/blue-mussel-lino-block-print-natural">Blue Mussel</a>, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></div><p>The blue mussel (Mytilus edulis), or common mussel, is a medium-sized edible marine bivalve mollusc in the family Mytilidae. They are aptly called common mussels and are found on temperate beaches worldwide. They are also yummy.</p><p>A more complicated print is my lined chiton. They are extraordinary wee animals, which come in all sorts of colours. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-HQrmhVJYFe2jbGQih8W7qCNWRNYfsB8zdW8VqDtEBoMQ-d6PZKyUA0CH5hQU1iXuqCy0ugVsYI8sLpsX5mCo6vR_WJZM4y1ytyJWYZDq04eUsquKruYOl4oWOmHKmGXFvAG0vz6d2ueiH1F7tXnFDxrmO5s6z4GscxHs-wvsgbYBRx289mQ3fyuUT54F/s1793/LinedChitonSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Lined Chiton, Linocut, 5" x 7" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1793" data-original-width="1793" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-HQrmhVJYFe2jbGQih8W7qCNWRNYfsB8zdW8VqDtEBoMQ-d6PZKyUA0CH5hQU1iXuqCy0ugVsYI8sLpsX5mCo6vR_WJZM4y1ytyJWYZDq04eUsquKruYOl4oWOmHKmGXFvAG0vz6d2ueiH1F7tXnFDxrmO5s6z4GscxHs-wvsgbYBRx289mQ3fyuUT54F/w640-h640/LinedChitonSq.jpg" title="Lined Chiton, Linocut, 5" x 7" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1686961917/lined-chiton-reduction-lino-block-print">Lined Chiton</a>, Linocut, 5" x 7" by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The lined chiton, Tonicella lineata, is a beautiful, colourful tiny marine mollusc of the North Pacific. Each 5 cm (2") long animal has zigzag purple or black lines on eight valves on a array of different colours like brown, red or burgundy like here but can also be bright blue or yellow to orange with a hairless girdle in colours like brown to red or pink, often with regular yellow or white patches. It is found from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to San Miguel Island of California, as well as the Sea of Okhotsk of Russia and northern Japan in the intertidal to subtidal waters of 30 to 90 m (100 ft to 300 ft) depth. It's thought their colourful bodies are intended to camouflage against algae. They are prey of the ochre starfish. <br /><br />Chitons are also sometimes known as sea cradles or coat-of-mail shells or suck-rocks, or more formally as loricates, polyplacophorans, and occasionally as polyplacophores. <br /><br />Each print is made on 12.7 cm x 17.7 cm (5" x 7") printmaking paper. Because this is a reduction print, after each colour, I carved away more of the block, this is a limited edition of 12 prints. When they are gone, there will be no more originals.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-40016079476141505122024-02-05T10:19:00.000-05:002024-02-05T10:19:13.119-05:00Heart Cockles and Fuchsia Flatworm<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhziPB3FxIa7Rf4n1bIoLnxuKb9p48vUfPEYSaP3MN4j51HeFgUNAcKiYqoeL96Qv_F-OH2j_EbBqnWenFAlJFbfIxEw0IaGVTkGpaFoGkMhiaBcKB1zPo-iXpv-FJmCkq6P8LKNCOp_XFIzzI5XNr-tAO0siVIAK2Q8MiZ4dmq1hKkFkWn2TzDYK6AzhtH/s1406/HeartCocklesSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Heart Cockles, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1406" data-original-width="1406" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhziPB3FxIa7Rf4n1bIoLnxuKb9p48vUfPEYSaP3MN4j51HeFgUNAcKiYqoeL96Qv_F-OH2j_EbBqnWenFAlJFbfIxEw0IaGVTkGpaFoGkMhiaBcKB1zPo-iXpv-FJmCkq6P8LKNCOp_XFIzzI5XNr-tAO0siVIAK2Q8MiZ4dmq1hKkFkWn2TzDYK6AzhtH/w640-h640/HeartCocklesSq.jpg" title="Heart Cockles, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1646593306/you-warm-the-cockles-of-my-heart-lino">Heart Cockles</a>, 6.5" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>Was thinking of both the #PrinterSolstice prompt monochromatic and the upcoming #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt infauna for March (shell month) when I made this print... and of course, Valentine's Day.</p><p><i>Corculum cardissa</i>, the heart cockle, is a species of marine bivalve mollusc in the family Cardiidae found in the Indo-Pacific. If viewed from the side, it looks like a heart. There is a lot of colour variation in shells, but they often have patterns in coral pink like those in my print. Interestingly, the shells are translucent in places, allowing light in which benefits its symbiotic relationship with photosynthesizing dinoflagellates (zooxanthellae), which live within its tissues. The cockle takes in the dinoflagellates by its mouth. Their presence causes a tertiary series of tubules develop from the walls of the cockle's digestive system which are a safe environment for them to live and photosynthesize, producing metabolites which help the cockle.</p><p>The next #PrinterSolstice prompt was split complimentary and it lead me to another #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt. To make a split complimentary colour, choose two complimentary colours, like yellow and purple, and replace the second colour by the two colours adjacent to it on the colour wheel - fuchsia and indigo. <br /></p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjft3M64s0dZM9ez8PSdrsz9I1qKBEmOwHoBD_a59ZUihgjcMexSG9N2QqBFpArTRElD6KsAK1ACnFUWUuEORNiS7yoHj2Ew_MdGpJIMKklng40-vxaIYFZ5zwklMPLOS4k1Tg8Iz2vQU8l2NLDOCJUqQWvmhGIjrMt_oUcThDlQhG99kGqmCPqV2h8adNN/s1465/FuchsiaFlatwormSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Fuchsia Flatworm, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1465" data-original-width="1465" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjft3M64s0dZM9ez8PSdrsz9I1qKBEmOwHoBD_a59ZUihgjcMexSG9N2QqBFpArTRElD6KsAK1ACnFUWUuEORNiS7yoHj2Ew_MdGpJIMKklng40-vxaIYFZ5zwklMPLOS4k1Tg8Iz2vQU8l2NLDOCJUqQWvmhGIjrMt_oUcThDlQhG99kGqmCPqV2h8adNN/w400-h400/FuchsiaFlatwormSq.jpg" title="Fuchsia Flatworm, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fuchsia Flatworm, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>One of the suggested #InsertAnInvert2024 organisms is the strange and beautiful fuchsia flatworm (<i>Pseudoceros ferrugineus) </i>with its gorgeous aposematic colours, a warning to predators that it's not worth the trouble to try and eat. A flexible ruffled oval creature it is a little hard to capture but it does indeed have a split complementary colour scheme. It crawls around eating on the reefs of the Indo-Pacific without any fear of predators.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-14052726834090886602024-02-02T14:40:00.001-05:002024-02-02T14:40:26.945-05:00Annie Jump Cannon, Census Taker of the Sky<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgufhSgfdYypUXXoWF_5royXSJGO3OFJ0JOHZVXp8LFZRMj4n87uhGgmQoBOQbT5rk7bZNcHj5ZhPzCxp6LYT-k23mDQlaGjeKzhLE2wYFR3YP0WblJK0vG6AzwVg5AClTGLeR4XcwdARGQg8oKwFl0HibQ62soWv03rpjIhyphenhyphen9wNJLC78jt-4V5zL0ct-bZ/s1825/AnnieJumpCannonSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Annie Jump Cannon, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1825" data-original-width="1825" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgufhSgfdYypUXXoWF_5royXSJGO3OFJ0JOHZVXp8LFZRMj4n87uhGgmQoBOQbT5rk7bZNcHj5ZhPzCxp6LYT-k23mDQlaGjeKzhLE2wYFR3YP0WblJK0vG6AzwVg5AClTGLeR4XcwdARGQg8oKwFl0HibQ62soWv03rpjIhyphenhyphen9wNJLC78jt-4V5zL0ct-bZ/w640-h640/AnnieJumpCannonSq.jpg" title="Annie Jump Cannon, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1670899819/lino-block-print-of-astronomer-annie">Annie Jump Cannon</a>, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td></tr></tbody></table><br />I knew the #PrinterSolstice prompt "spectrum" called for another scientist portrait!</p><p>My hand printed lino block portrait of trailblazing American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941) shows her with her stellar classification system which sorted stars based on spectral types and turned out to reveal their temperature from hot blue stars through cool red stars into O,B,A, F, G, K and M, as shown on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram behind her. Along with her supervisor Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, the first serious stellar classification scheme. The name, citing Harvard rather than Cannon herself, who still lacked a university appointment, makes her achievement less visible than it might have been.<br /><br />The eldest of three daughters of Delaware shipbuilder and state senator Wilson Cannon and his second wife Mary Jump, Annie was born in Dover, Delaware. Her mother taught her the constellations, home economics (and the organization skills she would later need) and encouraged her to pursue her own interests. Annie and her mother used old astronomy textbooks to identify stars they could see by climbing out a trapdoor onto their roof. She studied mathematics, chemistry, and biology at Wellesley College, a top school for women, where she excelled at math. She studied physics with Sarah Frances Whiting, one of the few US women physicists at the time, and became the valedictorian. She graduated with a degree in physics in 1884 and returned home to Delaware. Over the next decade she studied the new art of photography, photographing her travels through Europe with her Blair box camera. The Blair company published her photos and prose about Spain, "In the Footsteps of Columbus" and distributed it as a souvenir at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.<br /><br />A cheerful and energetic person, she lost most of her hearing as a young adult, possibly due to scarlet fever. She found it made it hard to socialize. Then her mother died in 1894, which made family life difficult too. She wrote Sarah Frances Whiting seeking a job and was hired as a junior physics teacher, which allowed her to take graduate physics and astronomy classes and study spectroscopy on her own. She gained access to a better telescope by enrolling in Radcliffe College (a women's college affiliated with Harvard) in 1894 as a "special student" which allowed her to use the he Harvard College Observatory. Harvard astronomer Edward C. Pickering hired her as his assistant in 1896. He was running a program to map and catalogue every visible star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of about 9 (16 times fainter than visible by human eye alone) to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, a research program fund by the widow of a wealthy physician and amateur astronomer. He hired men to do the physical jobs of operating heavy telescopes and making photographs. He hired and supervised a group of women (whom he could pay as little as 25 cents an hour to work seven hours a day, six days a week) known as the Harvard Computers to do examine data, do calculations and catalogue photos - work he did not deem proper scientific analysis. Though hired as mere "computers" this team included such astronomy luminaries as Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Williamina Fleming and Antonia Maury who made important advancements in the field. Pickering wanted the optical spectra of as many spectra as possible with the goal of indexing and classifying stars by spectra. The Draper Catalogue became an <span>indispensable tool for astronomers.<br /></span></p><p>Cannon worked at the Observatory until 1940. In her first three years, she classified 1000 stars. By 1911 she was made the Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard and by 1913 she had learned to accurately classify 200 stars an hour! She published her first star catalogue in 1901. She finished her studies at Wellesley and was awarded a master's in 1907. In 1927, Pickering said "Miss Cannon is the only person in the world—man or woman—who can do this work so quickly," about her skills in star classification. <br /><br />The classification work was begun by Nettie Farrar, but she left the Observatory after a few months to get married. Antonia Maury (the first person to detect an calculate the orbit of a spectroscopic binary, and Draper's niece) took over. She insisted on a complex scheme, to the dismay of project manager Williamina Fleming (who catalogues ten thousand stars, 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, 10 novae and other astronomical phenomena including discovering the Horsehead Nebula) who wanted a simpler scheme. Cannon negotiated a compromise, applying a scheme dividing of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M, based on the Balmer absorption lines of hydrogen. Later when the scheme was understood to reflect stellar temperatures her initial sequence of the classes was reordered to go from hot to cold. <br /><br />Cannon excelled at the work thanks to her organizational skills and patience with the tediousness of the work. Her calm, friendly and hardworking personality lead her to a sort of ambassador-like role, brokering exchanges of equipment between male colleagues. Nicknamed "Census Taker of the Sky," she catalogued an estimated 350,000 stars, more than any other person. She also discovered 300 variable stars, five novas, and one spectroscopic binary.<br /><br />In 1914, she was admitted as an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society. Awarded an honorary doctor's degree in math and astronomy from Groningen University in 1921, she became one of the first women to receive an honorary doctorate from a European university. On May 9, 1922, the International Astronomical Union passed the resolution to formally adopt Cannon's stellar classification system. With minor changes (to include intensity as well as temperature) Annie Jump Cannon's classification system is still in use today. She got the opportunity to spend six months in Arequipa, Peru, photographing stars in the Southern hemisphere. In 1925 she became the first woman to receive an honorary science doctorate from Oxford and was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1929 she chosen as one of the "greatest living American women" by the League of Women Voters. In 1931, she was the first woman to win the Henry Draper Medal. In 1932 she won the Ellen Richards prize from the Association to Aid Scientific Research by Woman. She represented professional woman at at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1933. She became the William C. Bond Astronomer at Harvard University in 1938.<br /><br />Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin) used Cannon's data to show that stars are mainly composed of hydrogen and helium. <br /><br />Cannon retired in 1940 but kept working at the Observatory until a few weeks before she died at 77. Her work helped women gain acceptance and respect in the field. A dedicated suffragette she was also a member of the National Women’s Party. As The Woman Citizen’s noted in 1924, despite her achievements “The traffic policeman on Harvard Square does not recognize her name. The brass and parades are missing. She steps into no polished limousine at the end of the day’s session to be driven by a liveried chauffeur to a marble mansion.” But her legacy lives on in the discoveries she made, the classification system she developed, and the trail she blazed for women in astronomy. In 1935 she created the Annie J. Cannon Prize, awarded by the American Astronomical Society, for "the woman of any country, whose contributions to the science of astronomy are the most distinguished." The first recipient became the first woman full professor of astronomy at Harvard: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Like her mother before her, and her first physics professor Sarah Frances Whiting, Annie was able to mentor and promote the next generation of women astronomers. Payne-Gaposchkin wrote in Science, upon her death, “On the thirteenth of April, 1941, the world lost a great scientist and a great woman, astronomy lost a distinguished contributor and countless human beings lost a beloved friend by the death of Miss Annie J. Cannon.” Harlow Shapely, Directory of the Harvard Observatory wrote, “Her official position at the Harvard Observatory was the William Cranch Bond Astronomer and Curator of the Photographic Collection. Her unofficial position was dean of women astronomers of the world and a leading and most honored woman scientist.”<br /></p><p> </p><p><b>References</b></p><p><a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon">Annie Jump Cannon</a>, wikipedia, accessed February 2024 </p><p>Christ, Marian., <a href="https://www.amphilsoc.org/blog/annie-jump-cannon">Annie Jump Cannon</a>, American Philosophical Society, January 16, 2022. <br /></p><p>Geiling, Natasha., <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-women-who-mapped-the-universe-and-still-couldnt-get-any-respect-9287444/">The Women Who Mapped the Universe and Still Couldn’t Get Any Respect</a>, Smithsonian Magazine, September 18, 2013</p><p>Murphy, Norah M., <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/5/annie-jump-cannon/">Eyes to the Sky: Annie Jump Cannon and the Harvard Observatory</a>, The Harvard Crimsom, May 5, 2017</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification">Stellar classification</a>, wikipedia, accessed February 2024</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-26489482880217421362024-01-22T10:07:00.003-05:002024-01-22T10:07:45.448-05:00Koi & Dog, some recent linocut prints<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl2mFnKreBqrkKQiNvsfV4oFimJS79mK3sDjsklR3Sbu6_ATyDvC7qbbjnEhe4Kv4xOMmQ6S7B9hoKMy1ASTeyTE09lsCfMxOOyKLn2UD4qTqUE2Iwly7Uc6AmzL2m3ViYIMZkJLLyuF5rO_I9zfaNUvzuAq3yyKdSk3hZXaiVm6cTGmxDsvDh0uu6-sZN/s1139/Koi-sq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Koi linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1139" data-original-width="1139" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl2mFnKreBqrkKQiNvsfV4oFimJS79mK3sDjsklR3Sbu6_ATyDvC7qbbjnEhe4Kv4xOMmQ6S7B9hoKMy1ASTeyTE09lsCfMxOOyKLn2UD4qTqUE2Iwly7Uc6AmzL2m3ViYIMZkJLLyuF5rO_I9zfaNUvzuAq3yyKdSk3hZXaiVm6cTGmxDsvDh0uu6-sZN/w640-h640/Koi-sq.jpg" title="Koi linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1654092165/koi-lino-block-print-ornamental-coloured?click_key=842edb7eb2ea56125415307d82081df10c6277b0%3A1654092165&click_sum=6a5b8026&ref=shop_home_active_1">Koi</a>, linocut, 8" x 10" by Ele Willoughby, 2024<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>The 3rd prompt in the Printer Solstice series this year was "complementary colours." I went for one of my favorite combinations: orange and blue and made a koi fish.</p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuogdTdvN4y6TLQf6-MM9vXAa85W5ysDDxAh9-xHisAs5J1-bplrMhT9T51jVSRPAGf0q5tUSxaMwOTJXtwT10dutgPnFFcXbJ0kyH172Xb9HgZJGbsNV0BHa9LwQ4FIiLPTjTrCIhIybkwTZDnmhyphenhyphenhD94flC7MZGg1uKBPCCGS2AUkTKNRUtRuuopojty/s2087/CassieSq.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2087" data-original-width="2087" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuogdTdvN4y6TLQf6-MM9vXAa85W5ysDDxAh9-xHisAs5J1-bplrMhT9T51jVSRPAGf0q5tUSxaMwOTJXtwT10dutgPnFFcXbJ0kyH172Xb9HgZJGbsNV0BHa9LwQ4FIiLPTjTrCIhIybkwTZDnmhyphenhyphenhD94flC7MZGg1uKBPCCGS2AUkTKNRUtRuuopojty/w640-h640/CassieSq.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p>Before the holidays, I made some custom portraits for a family friend of their golden retriever, both a "head shot" and the complete dog.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZjRptLVCCMnO3N4FipdDYlu4ykDBaa3ROzCJebTFT8d-JfXanM_cjzEtNiWuE8Ii2HRY2CRVrkv2Uqag5W92bb6tK7-fXwxbcX8TFFX15L540XPYjJPGpmOF6YrpF5XIeDNm19BX5aHUJHSbcCq58gKmop0RD9ZaSp5n0_JxpZAeZj5vjuyZ1jxG8QTI/s1523/GoldenRetriverC1sq.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1523" data-original-width="1523" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZjRptLVCCMnO3N4FipdDYlu4ykDBaa3ROzCJebTFT8d-JfXanM_cjzEtNiWuE8Ii2HRY2CRVrkv2Uqag5W92bb6tK7-fXwxbcX8TFFX15L540XPYjJPGpmOF6YrpF5XIeDNm19BX5aHUJHSbcCq58gKmop0RD9ZaSp5n0_JxpZAeZj5vjuyZ1jxG8QTI/s320/GoldenRetriverC1sq.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-71679346535623202522024-01-17T11:24:00.001-05:002024-01-17T11:24:19.128-05:00Marine Biologist Maude Jane Delap and the Jellyfish<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXzHEoy4Z1Tb_bnhylDbpRO4xBhhIRUl3y5jqLg7TQOgPnLMLdg9XTYw0cuT6JgxKC598HSa4uJlm54cv4P3mvnsQbCvcYAEMSPLxQ_yudrahFkJ_H3Lqruq7O9UEmoU3CbLPyLSkg0qOV7FJc1Eegm_4HAOjKrCUsNFgNhjhdYBz1XzTJzWZFqymDkPD9/s1231/MaudeDelapSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Maude Delap, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" border="0" data-original-height="1231" data-original-width="1231" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXzHEoy4Z1Tb_bnhylDbpRO4xBhhIRUl3y5jqLg7TQOgPnLMLdg9XTYw0cuT6JgxKC598HSa4uJlm54cv4P3mvnsQbCvcYAEMSPLxQ_yudrahFkJ_H3Lqruq7O9UEmoU3CbLPyLSkg0qOV7FJc1Eegm_4HAOjKrCUsNFgNhjhdYBz1XzTJzWZFqymDkPD9/w640-h640/MaudeDelapSq.jpg" title="Maude Delap, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1659047845/marine-biologist-maude-jane-delap-lino">Maude Delap</a>, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>The next prompt for #PrinterSolstice is "cool colours" and I was reminded of the sea, and a woman suggested to me for my women in STEM series. </p><p>This is my linocut portrait of self-taught trail-blazing Irish marine biologist Maude Jane Delap (1866 – 1953) who was the first person to successfully breed jellyfish in captivity and document their full lifecycle, something extraordinarily hard to do. Her work is still cited in laboratory manuals for jellyfish rearing. She made an extensive study of plankton over many years near her remote home on Valentia Island, off Ireland's west coast. She also discovered a sea anemone named in her honour, Edwardsia delapiae. In my portrait she is surrounded by different stages in the blue jellyfish (Cyanea lamarckii) based on her own illustrations of her published research.<br /><br />Born the seventh of ten children to Rev Alexander Delap and Anna Jane (née Goslett) in Templecrone Rectory, County Donegal, Maude moved with her family to Valentia Island at age 8. Her father had been assigned to the parishes of Valentia and Cahersiveen, and, a keen sailor, he sailed around the coast with two of her brothers. Their possessions, following in a second boat, arrived a little worse for wear. Her mother and the rest of the children travelled by train. While the girls had less formal education than their brothers, they had some progressive primary school education and their naturalist father encouraged Maude and her sister Constance <span id="co-subject-A"></span>(1868–1935) in their interest in biology and zoology. He himself had published articles in the Irish Naturalist and the whole family were avid naturalists. Maude and Constance became prolific collectors of marine specimen, many of which are still housed by the Natural History Museum, Dublin. Maude and her sister got reports from visiting fishermen of interesting species in all the their catch, for which they would pay a few shillings, encouraging what is now often known as "citizen science" or "community science." They were sometimes invited aboard to observe finds and jellyfish. Since the family enjoyed boating and fishing, Maude and Constance learned how to handle a boat and would row out alone, exploring the coast and caves. The Fisheries Board granted them part-time access to their steam boat for their research.<br /><br />The sisters' work lead to a survey by the Royal Irish Academy headed by Edward T. Browne of University College London in 1895 and 1896. Browne was particularly interested in plankton, the floating marine organisms ranging in size from microbes to large jellyfish, which are often the basis of the food chain and indicative of ocean health. Maude and Constance continued with their systematic study, gathering specimen of often tiny jellyfish and plankton by dredging and tow-netting, as well as recording sea temperature and changes in marine life for 28 years! They brought specimen back to the lab to identify and sketch them. Maude's patience, attention to detail, skill with her microscope and as an artist allowed her to document microscopic details of jellyfish structures and organs. Maude corresponded with Browne for forty years until his death in 1937. It's speculated that she had fallen in love with him; it was unrequited and he married a colleague. She sent him a box of violets she grew in her garden each year for his birthday. Browne thanked both sisters in his publications and jointly published research with Maude. <br /><br />Maude became fascinated by the life cycle of jellyfish. She painstakingly developed a means of keeping them alive in captivity - something which other scientists had struggled and failed to achieve. She determined their diet, at each stage of development, through trial and error and explained the paramount role proper diet plays in being able to keep them in captivity. She changed the water daily, adjusting temperature to match that in the habour, where they thrived, and carefully monitored the jellyfish. She was the first person to breed them successfully in her home laboratory. The life cycle of the jellyfish is unusual: an adult medusa can procreate by producing a planuala (or egg), which implants on a surface like the seafloor and grows into a polyp (which looks a little like a plant rooted in the ground). The polyp can grow into a budding polyp. This stage of the cycle can go either direction; in less than optimal conditions the budding polyp can revert to the polyp stage. In optimal conditions the budding polyp will bud off ephyrae and these eventually grow into adult medusae. Previous to Delap's work, these various stages could be misinterpreted as separate species. She bred four species of jellyfish including Chrysaora isosceles (the compass jellyfish) and Cyanea lamarckii (the blue jellyfish shown in my print) and documented their life cycles and feeding habits and published her results. Her trailblazing research was the first identification of the various life cycle stages (medusa and hydra) that belong to which species. Quite unusually for a woman at the time, Maude published several influential scientific papers under her own name: she published six articles, and three short notes, including two co-authored by Constance. Thanks to her contributions to marine biology she was offered a position in 1906 at the Plymouth Marine Biological Station in England. She declined the job; her father had apparently declared, "No daughter of mine will leave home, except as a married woman." While this lost opportunity must have been an immense disappointment, she continued her work at home. Leaving Valentia, and her sisters, at age 40 might also have been quite a daunting prospect. Staying in Valentia allowed her to produce her incredible lengthy study of Valentia harbour, and support her unmarried sisters for the rest of their lives, growing and fishing for food and earning income from selling flowers from her garden.<br /><br />When her father died later that year, the her mothers, two sisters and Maude moved out of the Parsonage and were permitted to use Reenellen House by the Knight of Kerry. There, they hosted many guests including friends, family, visiting scientists and naturalists, and fishermen seeking safety and shelter in bad weather. While remote, Valentia was home to a telegraph station which was the European terminus for the trans-Atlantic cable, a weather station and an observatory, which did lead to a number of visiting engineers, scientists and marine biologist. The Delap sisters were highly-regarded members of their community, who helped run the local cottage hospital and fisherman's hall, known for their charity and generosity but also for wearing outdated Edwardian clothes, both for propriety and economic necessity. Her nephews recalled going fishing in the evening to feed all the guests, along with fruits and vegetables they grew in the garden. They set up a laboratory they fondly dubbed "The Department" which was described by her nephew as an "heroic jumble of books, specimens, aquaria, with its pervasive low-tide smell." Aquaria contained not only jellyfish, but fish, starfish and even a thornback ray Maude reared from an egg. She buried dead marine vertebrates in her garden to recover their skeletons. <br /><br />In 1920, as the official whale-stranding officer for south west Ireland, appointed by the British Museum and the local contact for interesting wildlife, she was alerted to a stranded 16-foot whale on the rocks beyond the lighthouse. So she rowed out with her handyman, and she correctly identified a rare True's beaked whale, only previously been known from an incomplete US specimen. Unable to save it, she sent its head and flippers (on request) to the Natural History Museum and buried the rest in her garden. The Museum later requested the rest of the skeleton, causing her to dig up her asparagus garden to gather them. The Museum wrote again that two tiny vestigial pelvic bones were missing so Maude dug up her garden again and sieved the soil until she received a telegram from the Museum which read, “Stop! New York Museum informs us that True’s beaked whale does not possess vestigial pelvic bones." <br /><br />In 1928, she found a previously undescribed sea anemone burrowing deep into the eelgrass. Named in her honour, the Burrowing Sea Anemone (Edwardsia delapiae) has only been observed in Valentia habour. In 1936, she was made an associate of the Linnean Society of London. In 1937 she was made an associate member of the Marine Biological Association. She submitted specimen and corresponded with the Natural History Museum from 1894 until 1949, when she was 83. Like her father before her, she submitted observations to Dr Scully’s “Flora and Fauna of Kerry” and both are acknowledged in the text. Maude was also interested in folklore, geology, botany and archaeology and she published several papers in the Kerry Archaeological Magazine. Her grand-nephew recalled Maude, the "old-school Victorian all-round naturalist”, saying, “Wherever we went, she was instantly recognized and greeted with delight”. She died in 1953, and was buried alongside her sisters near Knightstown, Valentia Island, County Kerry. There is now a plaque from the Irish National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology to commemorate her and her work, on the island.</p><p> </p><p><b>References</b>,</p><p>Byrne, Patricia M. Delap, Maude Jane. Dictionary of Irish Biography. <br /></p><div class="block__content"><span class="views-field views-field-field-doi"><strong class="views-label views-label-field-doi">DOI: </strong><span class="field-content">https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.002516.v1 </span></span><div><div class="view view-biography-publishing-information view-id-biography_publishing_information view-display-id-block_1 js-view-dom-id-dd922e5f2a455246befe605f95c89208187ae230ccdd3af7f20c9a86b736068d"><div class="view-content"><div class="views-row"><div class="views-field views-field-field-volume"><div class="field-content">Originally published October 2009 as part of the Dictionary of Irish Biography</div></div><div class="views-field views-field-revision-timestamp"><span class="field-content">Last revised October 2009</span></div><div class="views-field views-field-revision-timestamp"><span class="field-content"> </span></div><div class="views-field views-field-revision-timestamp"><span class="field-content">Cronin, Nessa. </span><a href="https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/2019/01/07/gendering-natural-history-maude-jane-delap-valentia-island-ireland-1866-1953/#_edn2">Gendering Natural History: Maude Jane Delap, Valentia Island, Ireland (1866-1953)</a>. <a href="https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/" rel="home">Land Lines Project</a>. January 7, 2019.<span class="field-content"> </span></div></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div><p><span class="wixui-rich-text__text" style="color: black;">M. J. Delap.
1905. Notes on the rearing, in an aquarium of Cyanea Lamarcki, Peron et
Lesueur. <a href="https://oar.marine.ie/handle/10793/1464">Annual report of Fisheries</a>, Ireland 1902-03. II (I(ii)) 20-22.</span> <br /></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maude_Delap">Maude Delap</a>, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2024. </p><p>Muka, Samantha Kay. <a href="http://throughaquariumglass.blogspot.com/2012/10/maude-delap-jellyfish-goddess-of-north_29.html">Maude Delap: Jellyfish Goddess of the North Atlantic</a>, Through the Aquarium Glass blog, October 29, 2012.<br /></p><p> </p><p>Sheehan, Jane. <a href="https://www.ecomuseumlive.eu/finding-maude-delap">Finding Maude Delap</a>, <span class="wixui-rich-text__text">LIVE – Llŷn, Iveragh Ecomuseum blog, accessed January, 2024</span></p><p>Sheehan, Jane. Finding Maude Delap, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvp7Xv9kdyo">Online Lunchetime Talk, </a><span class="wixui-rich-text__text"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvp7Xv9kdyo">LIVE – Llŷn, Iveragh Ecomuseum, YouTube</a>, February 11, 2022.<br /></span></p><p>Sheehan, Jane. <a href="https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/6c6d88a276b04a048a1cf38796d3314b">Maude Delap Heritage Trail</a>. 27 July 2023. (Accessed January 2024)</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-28443891664028725172023-12-29T14:01:00.001-05:002023-12-29T14:01:56.028-05:00Printer Solstice is back and all about colour!<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy80bEeOshd4wGkP546u231vCQsTD-7cISJ4LFhdCkGSL2sVT2YajzPSGhAWHMcNmgG-y4886mMrGVfXohQ5G5CikAZ8jhCPHJ38oPBMtAUqOMHpK2qxo-e2RCjg2Fcq1HcDEu6Z1ycjZI6LRIa1x9jBXWgokBAZ5Z6w60tY8FzU31gHqv1LBbBjI6dzZX/s1753/ArcticFoxSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1753" data-original-width="1753" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy80bEeOshd4wGkP546u231vCQsTD-7cISJ4LFhdCkGSL2sVT2YajzPSGhAWHMcNmgG-y4886mMrGVfXohQ5G5CikAZ8jhCPHJ38oPBMtAUqOMHpK2qxo-e2RCjg2Fcq1HcDEu6Z1ycjZI6LRIa1x9jBXWgokBAZ5Z6w60tY8FzU31gHqv1LBbBjI6dzZX/w640-h640/ArcticFoxSq.jpg" title="Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1632363650/arctic-fox-and-aurora-folklore-of-the?click_key=1c096601d8752c10817bdea0c9e32fd0f24b0748%3A1632363650&click_sum=2c793cf8&ref=shop_home_active_1">Arctic fox and Aurora,</a> linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table></p><p>I always enjoy the #PrinterSolstice series of prompts. I gets me started on my year of printmaking, often trying new things. This year the prompts are all about colour. I am all about colour... but this will be a challenge, as I often carve first, plan colours second. Especially the first two prompts: the absence of colour and tetradic colours.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgexou8CEuyO71POQt2vHPeT9Le0JUv41DRE3FPvI2MxrJ4rMTkGAnqPn4F7ibGWWdQFMp8q6HNWsT6pRkA83BOiF2059aQj-VCLGbYKaJsaa9ycgg_2ZzpKJml3sL2cKwvV29gV4AlON8dXinkN_QJUCwWCp0LocubzIaXcmY1B_LtPwVzGJM4YnQ-7Atj/s1510/IMG_5463.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1510" data-original-width="1466" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgexou8CEuyO71POQt2vHPeT9Le0JUv41DRE3FPvI2MxrJ4rMTkGAnqPn4F7ibGWWdQFMp8q6HNWsT6pRkA83BOiF2059aQj-VCLGbYKaJsaa9ycgg_2ZzpKJml3sL2cKwvV29gV4AlON8dXinkN_QJUCwWCp0LocubzIaXcmY1B_LtPwVzGJM4YnQ-7Atj/w622-h640/IMG_5463.jpg" title="Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="622" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Snowflakes, blind embossed print by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br />I love colour... so the absence of colour is less than obvious for me. I could certainly work in black and white, but I decided to go all out and make a blind embossed print without any ink at all. Using moistened water colour paper, a carved lino block and my etching press, I made a print with the texture of snowflakes. </p><p>I had to look up "tetradic colours." It's a colour scheme of four colours equidistant on the colour wheel. People describe it as vibrant or even aggressive. So, that took some planning! I have been thinking of adding to my collection of prints of arctic animals with the aurora. I read about a legend from Finland that the aurora is cause by the "fire fox," a fast running arctic fox whose big busy tail brushes sprays of snowflakes up into the sky. So I loved the idea of a print which straddles the natural history and the folklore collections of prints. The colourful Northern Lights gave me a way of working four colours into a cohesive design.<br /></p><p>The rest of the prompts should be easier for me, but I still have a lot of planning and imagining to do. They remaining prints will feature: complementary colours, cool colours, analogous colours, monochromatic colour scheme, split complementary colours, spectrum of colours, CMYK colours, triadic colours, primary colours and warm colours.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-49955180151144417992023-11-24T20:18:00.001-05:002023-11-24T20:20:28.604-05:00My Folklore Week 2023 Illustrations<p>Once again I took part in Folktale Week this year! There's fabulous and magical illustrations from artists worldwide; check out #FolktaleWeek2023 on Instagram (plus hashtags for each prompt of the form FolktaleWeek + prompt). The prompts this year were: lost, ink, sea, sleep, underground, illusion, and found. I've decided I can interpret "folktale" loosely to include fairytales, legends, myths and folklore.</p><p>For lost, I knew I wanted to make the Minotaur in his labyrinth, with the slightest hint of the first person to avoid getting lost: Theseus with his ball of string.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggnvPQP58NuC-ac5SyfIcI2_gTi-ZzyI9gkUfgPwaWlflJqfG2EKjYzFBqGUCcN_8T3J8SltSGxfhwZDlf8cJchQVeY5TUdhz5syrFm9nHKpAN21cqtehjOMVy6stRb_ES1vvDZResaeIPl9eg3B3qx03xCgz5hqA6cxO8c1D4fpjjcvVrotaYEwBA-B4y/s2168/MinotaurSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="The Minotaur in his Labyrinth, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="2168" data-original-width="2168" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggnvPQP58NuC-ac5SyfIcI2_gTi-ZzyI9gkUfgPwaWlflJqfG2EKjYzFBqGUCcN_8T3J8SltSGxfhwZDlf8cJchQVeY5TUdhz5syrFm9nHKpAN21cqtehjOMVy6stRb_ES1vvDZResaeIPl9eg3B3qx03xCgz5hqA6cxO8c1D4fpjjcvVrotaYEwBA-B4y/w640-h640/MinotaurSq.jpg" title="The Minotaur in his Labyrinth, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1589465056/the-minotaur-in-his-labyrinth-lino-block">The Minotaur in his Labyrinth</a>, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Ink was a real challenge! I had a few ideas but in the end, opted for a Japanese <i>yokai</i>, a sort of supernatural spirit called <i>suzuri no tamashii</i>. Specifically it’s a type of <i>yokai </i>called a <i>tsukumogami</i>, a type of spirit which can arise from an object which is used for 100 years, when it comes alive. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7SNuYXKJq5DLhyphenhypheniQmKbTsX4FrmZznhXA0uraxmB4JiKTMtHYWgz5TJY8ZEMjMCcny9tPy8mrL3e0zBfGZeYELZjfny0qyfTV0WW_AZPUb4iSAuGNRtBbEM_xFPHo9fzTyM9Q1ReyD3BqaeQEU7AaXUU71I109MR-79UB8cZmm4JgWKis0IU5ROylGxuzs/s1931/SuzuriNoTamashiiSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Suzuri no tamashii, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1931" data-original-width="1931" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7SNuYXKJq5DLhyphenhypheniQmKbTsX4FrmZznhXA0uraxmB4JiKTMtHYWgz5TJY8ZEMjMCcny9tPy8mrL3e0zBfGZeYELZjfny0qyfTV0WW_AZPUb4iSAuGNRtBbEM_xFPHo9fzTyM9Q1ReyD3BqaeQEU7AaXUU71I109MR-79UB8cZmm4JgWKis0IU5ROylGxuzs/w640-h640/SuzuriNoTamashiiSq.jpg" title="Suzuri no tamashii, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1607866725/lino-block-print-of-the-japanese-ink">Suzuri no tamashii</a>, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /><br />The story goes that an ink stone was used to copy the same manuscript over and over again for many generations, about the bloody Genpei War (1180-1185). The '<i>Akama suzuri</i>,' a top-quality inkstone made specially in Shimonoseki City, began to take on aspects of the story itself. It became possessed by a vengeful spirit of an <i>Ise-Heishi</i> warrior who had been defeated at the Battle of Dannoura, where the Minamoto clan brutally wiped out the entire Taira clan. Phantom sounds like fierce battle, waves on the sea or even a voice narrating "<i>Heike monogatari</i>" (The tale of the Heike) could be heard. Waves rippled on the ink and illusory characters and boats from the story, arose from the ink to wreak havoc on the writing.<br /><br />As many of the slaughtered Taira soldiers became vengeful spirits or <i>onryō </i>when they died, their grudge-curse infects many ink stones which have been used to repeatedly copy their story.<br /><br />My print shows an ink stone, ink stick, jar of brushes, and the <i>suzuri no tamashii </i>emerging like two mounted samurai warriors crossing a river from The tale of the Heike. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfN9wF420l288F5d5BzslLkVsIwSBut781Hc5d6xWAMlHSaV-JaTJQqPYKRJYhOJf-ir8NXFJziAsDIYahtiMBW5nZYmZRMSzjOQdmS3NJycb1rgP8s9Gtb-GiA38K7kSadu6p1hQNHKwiM-DEh4n97ui7xZ6GuUMkVyzHvLKDcJh0X9G9GvzVVc6vdMeB/s1737/ZaratanSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Zaratan, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1737" data-original-width="1737" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfN9wF420l288F5d5BzslLkVsIwSBut781Hc5d6xWAMlHSaV-JaTJQqPYKRJYhOJf-ir8NXFJziAsDIYahtiMBW5nZYmZRMSzjOQdmS3NJycb1rgP8s9Gtb-GiA38K7kSadu6p1hQNHKwiM-DEh4n97ui7xZ6GuUMkVyzHvLKDcJh0X9G9GvzVVc6vdMeB/w640-h640/ZaratanSq.jpg" title="Zaratan, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1586253016/zaratan-lino-block-print-the-legendary">Zaratan</a>, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>I knew what I wanted to do for sea; I've long wanted to illustrate the Zaratan, a mythical giant sea turtle that looks like a small island! There's a small campfire on the supposed beach, and a sailing ship from the age of exploration nearby. The sunset sky is in vibrant fuchsia, tangerine and purple.<br /><br />"<i>There is a story that is told in all lands and throughout all history - the story of sailors who go ashore on an unknown island that later sinks and drowns them, for the island is alive. This imaginary beast-island figures in the first voyage of Sindbad and in the sixth canto of Orlando Furioso (Ch'ella sia usa isoletta ci credemo; "We are all cheated by the floating pile, / And idly take the monster for an isle"); on the Irish legend of St. Brendan and in the Greek bestiary of Alexandria; in the Swedish curate Olaf Magnus' History of the Northern Nations (Rome, 1555) and in the passage in Paradise Lost, Book I, in which the prostrate Satan is compared to a great whale "hap'ly slumbering on the Norway foam.</i>" <br /><br /> -Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings (<i>El Libro de Los Seres Imaginarios</i>)<br /><br />Often depicted as a giant turtle, like the Turtle Island origin myth common to many Indigenous peoples of North America, the Zaratan could in fact be any large marine creature, but I love the idea of a giant turtle.</p><p>I found another great Japanese <i>yokai</i> for sleep: the <i>Baku</i>. Some stories about sleep are either familiar fairytales or in fact, a bit grim. I like the mythical Japanese chimera because despite its monstrous appearance, it is the beloved eater of nightmares. It was made from leftover
parts, with the body of a bear, the claws of a tiger, the tail of a cow,
the trunk and tusks of an elephant with the ears and eyes of a
rhinoceros! You can call on it if you have bad
dreams. A child who awakes from a nightmare will cry, “Baku-san, come
eat my dream!” three times and the baku will enter their room to devour
the bad dream so they can go back to sleep. They must be careful
however, not too call too often, least they get a hungry baku who will
also eat their dreams.<br />
<br />
Today the word baku can also apply to a real animal, the Malayan tapir,
because of its arguable resemblance to the mythical animal. <br />
<br />
I thought my blue origami paper would make a great comforter so I made 8 different variations! <br />
</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQqyNmSEctW4xgM9i9T438EApVu8qTiyZH_HsFItgl-UOdTH_EWMe4dgrcWmmfSAQ9tPpJ7u1VThTY4AoM53LpNRDT_J7CyQ0fh9pSRl_IgojRjEc-i6VS4QbMFJMOc8MeSDBC0bs-U9xl_oeP714ySyPzXBLRx3JRaZKLYp_AjPCYpxbEPzYas8KgOzsI/s1357/Baku2Sq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Baku, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1357" data-original-width="1357" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQqyNmSEctW4xgM9i9T438EApVu8qTiyZH_HsFItgl-UOdTH_EWMe4dgrcWmmfSAQ9tPpJ7u1VThTY4AoM53LpNRDT_J7CyQ0fh9pSRl_IgojRjEc-i6VS4QbMFJMOc8MeSDBC0bs-U9xl_oeP714ySyPzXBLRx3JRaZKLYp_AjPCYpxbEPzYas8KgOzsI/w640-h640/Baku2Sq.jpg" title="Baku, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1597001272/lino-block-print-of-the-mythical-baku">Baku</a>, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The idea I had for underground was the <i>Aos sí</i>, the people of the <i>Sidhe</i>, the Fair Folk of Ireland, who according to legend live beneath mounds in fairy forts underground. I have not yet editioned this print, but I plan to add it to my shop soon! You may know the banshee, or <i>Bean sídhe</i> or woman of the sídhe. In fact
the very word <i>Sídhe</i> is the term for earthen mounds like the one in my linocut and the <i>Aos sí </i>are “the people of mounds.” The <i>Sidhe</i> evolved
from a mythological people known as the <i>Tuatha De Danaan</i>, powerful,
magical semi-divine beings, who feature in many early Irish tales. When
the ancestors of the Irish, the Gaels arrived they battled over the
Emerald Isle. The way the story was told to me was that neither force
could conquer the other and they decided to divide Ireland evenly
between them. If you look at Ireland it’s quite an irregular shape and
the only way to split it evenly was top and bottom with the Gaels
occupying the upper world and the <i>Tuatha De Danaan</i> taking the lower
world.<br />
<br />
They’re known as the <i>daoine sí</i> or<i> daoine sìth</i> in Scots Gaelic and we get
the the idea of fairies from the fair folk, but our inherited Victorian
ideas and images of fairies are much gentler, sweeter and cuter than
these fierce beings who are benevolent if treated with respect but are
known to react cruelly if mistreated. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIlQoZSp64KvxgMDK-YfdB2Fs9N3ZGwX9FaJ1BL_VcRsWNuWEhWLodTKXl0mjaTzZ0c0_RWVEHJIKwu43K4-lvrrB1RVrIWJyL0k99z_mpgpz2jvhrK17bVGhS05tZZaVTfiRw4UaeavRJcV7p0qFVsjfnt8GZsSd9iDpfx1n51pZrb1xjr6zhUJ60B79g/s1788/TheSidheSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="The Sidhe, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1788" data-original-width="1788" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIlQoZSp64KvxgMDK-YfdB2Fs9N3ZGwX9FaJ1BL_VcRsWNuWEhWLodTKXl0mjaTzZ0c0_RWVEHJIKwu43K4-lvrrB1RVrIWJyL0k99z_mpgpz2jvhrK17bVGhS05tZZaVTfiRw4UaeavRJcV7p0qFVsjfnt8GZsSd9iDpfx1n51pZrb1xjr6zhUJ60B79g/w640-h640/TheSidheSq.jpg" title="The Sidhe, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Sidhe, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>For illusion, I chose a beautiful French fairytale: <i>La Chatte Blanche</i>, published by Madame d’Aulnoy in 1698. <br />
<br />
A king is worried about succession and sends his three sons on quests to
determine who will inherit the kingdom (or rather to distract them on
that pretence, to avoid being deposed by an impatient prince). First
they must find the smallest and most beautiful dog. They each go
their own way and the youngest finds a fantastical castle filled with
intelligent talking cats. He is quite taken by their beautiful white cat
queen who mysteriously wears a locket with a image which looks just
like him. He stays a full year and she gives him an acorn for his
quest. Returning home he opens the acorn for his father and inside is
the tiniest dancing dog. Despite clearly having won the contest, the
king starts another: find the finest muslin which can be drawn through
the eye of a needle. The princes go out again; the youngest returns to
the white cat for another year and she gives him a walnut with nested
series of smaller seeds, the tiniest containing magically fine and
beautiful muslin. His magical muslin is clearly the winner. The king
sets a third task to find the most beautiful princess bride. After a third
stay with the cats, the beloved white cat convinces the prince, to his
horror, to chop off her head. But when he does the fairy enchantment is
broken and she is revealed as a beautiful princess cursed by fairies so that she and those in her kingdom must live as cats unless her forbidden lover’s doppelgänger
cuts off her head. It was all an illusion! <br />
<br />
She reigned over six kingdoms so after the triple wedding of the three
princes, succession is solved as she grants brothers and father each
kingdoms to rule and she and her husband the youngest prince rule
the remaining three.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaSBiNm9fz-FcJueJeooXEW7O0AThGG9ycQhFKo8HQHhwqatHexmljmnMeLR6UvaFWzTkhzNqTmPnfXC1E8xnKATxocJoKOQ1x6qrKVOmUCq4L3bdZEZ04ShaThAumJ3W9qKn4CRTFZ2N3x3b_1tNF_YIqjkLfzI7vX7QsySeQEA8J43x5j9wQ0sjMOlu4/s1710/LaChatteBlancheNSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="La Chatte Blanche, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1710" data-original-width="1710" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaSBiNm9fz-FcJueJeooXEW7O0AThGG9ycQhFKo8HQHhwqatHexmljmnMeLR6UvaFWzTkhzNqTmPnfXC1E8xnKATxocJoKOQ1x6qrKVOmUCq4L3bdZEZ04ShaThAumJ3W9qKn4CRTFZ2N3x3b_1tNF_YIqjkLfzI7vX7QsySeQEA8J43x5j9wQ0sjMOlu4/w640-h640/LaChatteBlancheNSq.jpg" title="La Chatte Blanche, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1604551384/lino-block-print-of-the-white-cat">La Chatte Blanche</a>, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> <p></p><p><br /></p><p>I wanted to make sure I included a Canadian folktale this year. So often the folktales we hear are from Europe, but I wanted one from closer to home. I selected the Mermaid of the Magdalenes for the prompt "found." I loved that the found thing as something as prosaic as a tin of sardines, that this is a fairytale about my May Day birthday and about the perils of not preserving marine ecology. I still have to print an edition of this print, but I plan to do so soon.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioflKFABblBd9kmsQxPoTZMgrFs17ULKQGGmH2swVKdnH7JmnK_vDNcnSHJdWEsD4-mr_HEH09YHDwm-46Rj_0z5blqfhMj54Dd_5bbI0xMvYZ-4IdYSo34eQ_g9MHgj3jjBBqpZaB_IqYHb-rOofLKtQHdwiSA3FTVzGofdeeWtAI8da9ybqOVNlIfZpg/s1800/MermaidOfTheMagdalenesSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="The Mermaid of the Magdalenes, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioflKFABblBd9kmsQxPoTZMgrFs17ULKQGGmH2swVKdnH7JmnK_vDNcnSHJdWEsD4-mr_HEH09YHDwm-46Rj_0z5blqfhMj54Dd_5bbI0xMvYZ-4IdYSo34eQ_g9MHgj3jjBBqpZaB_IqYHb-rOofLKtQHdwiSA3FTVzGofdeeWtAI8da9ybqOVNlIfZpg/w640-h640/MermaidOfTheMagdalenesSq.jpg" title="The Mermaid of the Magdalenes, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Mermaid of the Magdalenes, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The rugged east coast Magdalene Islands are all but barren of grass and trees, but the waters are rich in fish and people called it the
“Kingdom of Fishes”. Traders could grow rich off the bounty of the sea.
Long ago when sardines were first canned they were wildly popular. There
was a great slaughter of sardines by greedy traders, who packed them in
tiny boxes and shipped them all over the world. The tiny sardines
were helpless against the onslaught. They saw their fellow sardines
killed and their numbers were dwindling. They cried out for help,
calling a meeting of all the fishes. There, they convinced their
brethren to stand with them and punish those who fished and ate
sardines. <br />
<br />
On May Day a ship filled with sardine cans was wrecked on the rocks of
the Magdalene Islands, its cargo strewn on shore. The daughter of a fish
trader found a tin and was delighted, hoping to eat them. But, she
was unable to get the can open sang a song of lament. <br />
<br />
“I love sardines when they’re boiled with beans<br />
And mixed with the sands of the sea.<br />
I am dying for some.<br />
Will nobody come and open this box for me?”<br />
<br />
A disgusted skate heard her but was too timid to punish her. A merman
wanted a land wife but he left her ashore because of his oath to the
sardines. Finally the black lobster heard her and remembered his oath.
He cunningly offered his help only to trick her and he grasped her
with his strong claw and dragged her out to sea. <br />
<br />
It’s believed he sold her to the merman. But on the 1st of May you can
see her off the coast of the island, her glass in hand, looking
longingly at shore as she brushes her hair, each year more and more a
fish. The fishermen hear her lonely mournful songs and stay ashore
least she drag them out to sea for company. </p><p> I found this story amongst the Canadian Folktales published by Cyrus MacMillan in 1922. <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-68749048538050099732023-10-10T10:16:00.006-04:002023-10-10T13:05:09.887-04:00Hildegard von Bingen, Medieval Medicine and Natural History for Ada Lovelace Day<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJazu_-o7GFn7tek9ufX-v75et5aeslwRkUKrmDIP04kWv1fc8VkVIeuIK-UydwY9v8OGB3CN0S1wo-g9yV80B8SSKhUGQlTmJfeiCBa-L9K9bj4SMKgIiLkot9-1luvwWIsUAgz-hDKWyNIajEiKr2j84B14vSVmOnjjhdYu4GlY4WSX_0JxtB2J7cYP8/s1737/HildegardSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Hildegard von Bingen, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1737" data-original-width="1737" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJazu_-o7GFn7tek9ufX-v75et5aeslwRkUKrmDIP04kWv1fc8VkVIeuIK-UydwY9v8OGB3CN0S1wo-g9yV80B8SSKhUGQlTmJfeiCBa-L9K9bj4SMKgIiLkot9-1luvwWIsUAgz-hDKWyNIajEiKr2j84B14vSVmOnjjhdYu4GlY4WSX_0JxtB2J7cYP8/w640-h640/HildegardSq.jpg" title="Hildegard von Bingen, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hildegard von Bingen, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p> </p><p><i></i></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/22611996@N02/15510740936" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Ada Lovelace, 3rd edition by Ele, on Flickr"><img alt="Ada Lovelace, 3rd edition" height="400" src="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3950/15510740936_10415d7976_z.jpg" width="290" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/169755655/ada-countess-lovelace-linocut-of-the" target="_blank"><i>Ada, Countess Lovelace</i></a>, 3rd edition linocut by Ele Willoughby </td></tr></tbody></table><i>It is once again Ada Lovelace Day, the 15th annual international
day of blogging to celebrate the</i><i> achievements of women in technology,
science and math, <a href="http://findingada.com/" rel="nofollow">Ada Lovelace Day 2023 (ALD23)</a>. I'm sure you'll all recall, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace" rel="nofollow">Ada</a>, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gordon_Byron,_6th_Baron_Byron" rel="nofollow">Lord Byron</a>, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage" rel="nofollow">Charles Babbage</a>'s
computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even
Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be
useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly
recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was.
She figured out how to compute <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_numbers" rel="nofollow">Bernouilli numbers</a> with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging.</i>
<p></p><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-3063329613014978034" itemprop="description articleBody">
<i> </i></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-3063329613014978034" itemprop="description articleBody"><i><a href="http://minouette.blogspot.ca/search/label/Ada%20lovelace%20day">You can find my previous Ada Lovelace Day posts here.</a> <br /></i></div><p><span style="font-size: small;">Despite some biased ideas about the Medieval period, which we inherited from Enlightenment scholars, the Dark Ages were only "dark" in the sense that there is a dearth of documentation. All too often, people have the idea that this was a stagnant period in the pursuit of knowledge after the end of the Classical period. Many documents of the time have simply been lost, so we don't have a lot of information about many individuals and their specific advancements in scientific thought. But the sheer fame and productivity of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) is an exception. Her writings preserve not only her own knowledge and theories but much of the nature of institutional medicine and folk healing of her day (which she deftly combined). While she might be best remembered today as a composer of seventy Gregorian chants and musical dramas and as a Catholic saint, author of biblical commentaries, three books on her visions and two biographies, she is also recognized as the progenitor of natural history in German-speaking lands and author of medical and natural history texts. She even invented her own script and language!</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Likely born the tenth child in her rural Rhineland family, her religious parents raised her intending for her to be a tithe to the church, and she entered the double-monastery at Disibodenberg at 14. Her well-respected <i>magistra</i> Jutta (1092-1136) became her mentor and teacher, and it is believed Hildegard was assigned to the infirmary. There she would have been responsible for, in particular, for but likely not limited to, the health of the women at the monastery and adjoining community. She would also have had access to the books and knowledge of her male counterpart, who was responsible in particular for the health of the men. After Jutta's death, Hildegard was elected <i>magistra</i> and she lead the Disibodenberg nuns until 1148, when at age 50, inspired by a vision, she moved them all to a new monastery at Rupertsberg at Bingen. She immediately began writing her text books. <i>Physica</i> <span><span style="color: black;">describes elements, mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, trees,
metals, and precious stones and medicinal uses of 293 plants </span></span><span><span style="color: black;"><span><span class="nowrap">(230 herbaceous plants and 63
trees)</span></span>. </span></span> <i>Causae et curae</i> was written presumably to ensure that her replacement in the infirmary had all the knowledge she would need. It describes 47 diseases along with causes, symptoms and treatments and goes on to document 300 plants used to treat diseases. It reads both like a Medieval first aid manual and technical scientific writing of her day. She lived in the new monastery until her death at 81. People traveled to Rupertsberg to receive healing from Hildegard and her order. She was a prodigious correspondent and has been called a Medieval
"Dear Abby" because of her letters to such luminaries as King Henry
II of England, King Louis VII of France, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederic
I Barbarossa, the Byzantine Empress Agnes of France, <span style="font-weight: 400;">Bernard of Clairvaux, four popes</span> and others. She was invited to preach at nearby cathedrals including at Cologne, Mainz and Worms. By the time she reached 80, she was so respected and renown that she could defy the pope and it was the pope who had to back down. Commanded to excommunicate a man in her community, she simply declined to do so. <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Outside of Salerno, those practicing medicine in her day were not university educated, but either working in monasteries and infirmaries or were folk healers using herbal folklore. Hildegard's contemporary woman in medicine Trota of Salerno is a notable exception, as she was formally educated at the medical school in Salerno. The rise of universities and formal medical schools actually lead to greater exclusion of women from medical practice; universities usually excluded women. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Hildegard developed a holistic understanding of medicine and was systematic and scientific in her approach within her Christian worldview. She is believed to have access to ancient Greco-Roman medical sources, typically available and shared between monasteries, including the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Pendanius Dioscoride. The Classical humoural theory was central to medicine until the 17th century. It related humours, or the vital bodily fluids, namely, according to Hipocrates, the blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile to human health and behaviour. Blood was considered hot and wet, yellow bile hot and dry, black bile cold and dry and phlegm cold and wet; these properties were used to try and diagnose how these humours might be unbalanced and causing disease. She likely also had access to texts by pioneering Arab and Persian physicians, and was abreast of some of the contemporary advancements from the Salerno school of medicine. Her medical philosophy is influenced by <span>St. Augustine, Isidore Hispalensis,
Bernard Sylvestris of Tours, and perhaps Boethius.</span> She would have been trained in nursing, diagnosis, prognosis, pharmacy and treatment by her monk colleague in the infirmary at Disibodenberg. She herself wrote about how the infirmarian was responsible for the infirmary garden and the "spices and medicinally active herbs," thus, she became expert at gardening and botany too. In addition to Latin terms, Hildegard includes German names for plants she could not name in Latin, so scholars believe she also incorporated knowledge from the folk herbalist, magical and medical tradition. Some instructions even prescribed charms and incantations. Importantly, she synthesized these disparate sources of knowledge. Along with the humoural theory, she believed that everything on Earth was made by God for man, so there's very little which could not be used in medicine to counter a humoural imbalance. For instance, she prescribed a poultice of quince, deemed "dry" to treat the "dampness" of an ulcer. Her writings actually allow an unusual insight into "wise woman" healing practices, as it was rare for other women to be literate in Latin. She wrote that she was told to <span>‘<i>write down that which you see and hear</i>’ in a vision, and thus recorded her visions. But she takes the same approach with medicine, writing down observations and supplementing her observations with knowledge from books rather than simply relying on their authority. This strategy hints at the beginnings of the scientific method.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Her philosophy of medicine was deeply influenced by her experience in the garden and she gives a special focus on "<i>viriditas</i>" or the greening power of plants, expanding on Galen and Hippocrates' four humors, connecting plants to human health, and viewing this greening force as also vital within the human body. She ties <i>viriditas</i> directly to fertility and vigor and describes it as a humour that can dry up. She approaches medicine the way a gardener nurtures a garden. Her approach in all things was quite holistic and she believed spiritual health complemented physical health. She begins her text <i>Causae et curae </i>with the creation of the cosmos<i> </i>and connects the human person as microcosm<i> </i>to the sacred macrocosm of the cosmos. Her work documents causes of disease, sexuality, psychology, physiology, diagnosis, treatments and prognosis. Illness, she wrote, was a result of falling into disharmony with creation and could be treated with rest, herbal cures, steam baths, a proper diet, and achieving spiritual peace. Her goal was to heal body, spirit and mind; in the 12th century healers commonly viewed health as involving all of these things. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">She discussed sexuality openly and women's reproductive health. She described female orgasm, nocturnal ejaculation, coitus as therapy, <span>conception</span><span>, birth, complications in childbirth, gynecological diseases, menstruation (</span><span>including botanical emmenagogues or menstruation stimulators), abortifacients (substances which can induce an abortion including sarum, white hellebore, feverfew, tansy, oleaster, and farn) and menopause. Medieval Christian healers would not hesitate to proscribe abortifacients to save a mother's life if it were at risk. She wrote about determining an embryo's sex and noted that children need affection for their psychological development, writing </span><span><span>“The strength of the male seed determines the
sex of the embryo, while the love of one parent to the other determines
the moral qualities of the child.” </span>She is likely the first woman to write about skin diseases and treatments including leprosy, </span><span><span>scabies, lice, insect bites, burns and conditions now believed to be </span></span><span><span><span> erysipela, paronychia, contact allergies, rosacea,
and rhinophyma. </span></span>Hers is the first </span><span><span>description of a peeling for rosacea, a method still used; she used plants that promote
blistering on the skin, which would then rapidly heal. </span>She recommended skin treatments with plants which we now can confirm have anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties. She recommended a balanced diet including cutting back on food high in fats and cholesterol and that salt should be taken in moderation to avoid hypertension. She writes about kidney and liver ailments and treatments; in her day, uroscopy and examining urine was considered </span><span>a doctor or healer's most reliable tool. She herself suffered migraines and she wrote about headaches and remedies. She precisely described toothache and even how nerves run from the brain to gums and the need for dental hygiene. She addresses depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. A modern study investigated whether her correct herbal remedies were mere lucky strikes - that is whether herbal remedies she reports which are still supported by modern science are just a result of chance. They found this could not be the case. Though most of her claims are not correct, she is correct far too often for it to be by mere chance. Further, she does not repeat all claims in ancient sources, suggesting she was independent in her thinking. </span><span>Most of her remedies are ingredients from the kitchen or garden but she also recommends the use of minerals including gold
for arthritis, emerald for heart pain, jasper for hay fever or for
cardiac arrhythmia, gold topaz for loss of vision, sulfur ointment for scabies and blue sapphire for
eye inflammation; most of these play no role in modern medicine, though gold is still used for arthritis and sulfur is still used for skin treatments for people and domestic animals. While all her writings and worldview were firmly planted within her faith, she did not presume sin was the primary cause for disease; bad humours, bad lifestyle or the weather were more often suspected. She makes pragmatic practical suggestions rather than trying to treat illness with prayer, penitence or pilgramage.</span><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">She invented her own alternate alphabet or secret code with symbols for each letter and applied it to her own <i>Lingua ignota</i> (<i>Unknown Language</i>), which consisted of 1000 invented words for a list of nouns. Scholars are divided on her intentions; was this a secret language to increase solidarity within nuns in her order, or was this intended for anyone? Modern conlangers (<span data-dobid="hdw">aficionados</span> of constructed languages) view her as a Medieval precursor. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">She formed a deep friendship and love for her assistant <span><a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/stade-richardis-von-d-1152">Richardis von Stade</a>, who worked beside her on her major work <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scivias">Scivias</a>. When Ricardis </span><span>was elected abbess of a
monastery at Bassum, far from Rupertsberg in 1151, Hildegard was bereft. She wrote to Richardis' mother, to </span><span>the Archbishop of Bremen and even to the pope, trying to get them to intervene, to no avail. She wrote letters of her grief to Ricardis, writing "</span><span>Now, let all who have grief like
mine mourn with me, all who, in the love of God, have had such great
love in their hearts and minds for a person- as I had for you- but who
was snatched away from them in an instant, as you were from me." Tragically, Richardis died the next year. </span></span> </p><p><span style="font-size: small;">My portrait includes some of her prescribed treatments which we can now confirm do have medical benefits (or at least effects). Clockwise from the top, she is surrounded: by tansy <span> (<i>Tanacetum vulgare</i>) </span>which has antibacterial and toxic contents; common comfrey (<i>Symphytum officinale</i>) is sometimes used on the skin to
treat wounds and reduce inflammation from sprains and broken bones, it roots and leaves contain allantoin, a substance that helps new
skin cells grow, along with other substances that reduce inflammation
and keep skin healthy; mandrake (species in the genus <i>Mandragora, </i>either<span style="font-weight: normal;"><i> Mandragora officinarum </i>or<i> </i></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>Mandragora autumnalis</i>) which contain hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids which are poisonous; sulfur she prescribed for skin ailments does indeed act as a fungicide; lemon balm (<i>Melissa officinalis</i>) which has been shown to have some calming effects, some antibacterial properties and positive effects on indigestion; and quince (</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>Cydonia oblonga</i>), which is understudied, but there is some early evidence that it may help prevent stomach ulcers (which would actually coincide with her advice). <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Above and below Hildegard is the alphabet along with her own alternate alphabet </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Litterae ignotae</i> which she used for her own <i>Lingua ignota</i> (<i>Unknown Language</i>). The scroll in her hand also shows medieval musical notation to represent her compositions. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Her map of the universe from her book <i>Scivias</i> in illustrated on her habit. She correctly viewed the Earth as spherical, and then in the typical Medieval worldview, she posits a series of <span><span class="nowrap">concentric celestial spheres, influencing events on Earth. Other Medieval thinkers describe a spherical universe. The shape of Hildegard's map of the universe is unique; </span></span>some describe it as oval, or egg-shaped others, more directly, as vulva-shaped. In the centre of her diagram is the Earth, as as you move upward, you see the moon, then the inner planets Mercury and Venus (which look like stars), then beyond the ring there is the Sun (the large flower-like shape) and outer planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (the three outermost star shapes). Recall, the further planets are not visible to the naked eye. She wrongly assumes the antipodes are uninhabitable, without a more modern understating of the cause of the seasons. Seasonal variations in the heavens and seasons on Earth were attributed to winds.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">While you could not call a Medieval woman a feminist, she did believe that men and women were equal before God, and rejected the prevailing Aristotelian idea that women were inferior inversions of men, with opposite but inferior relationships with humors and elements. She wrote, rather that, that women had different but not opposite or inferior relationships to the elements. To her, men and women were <span>complimentary aspects of the
divine.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Hildegard entered the monastery an uneducated child and grew to be a renown, respected thinker and healer, with a tremendous output in music, theology, natural history and medicine, who has been recognized as a saint. Her writings on medicine and reputation as a healer were used as arguments by early feminists that women should be admitted to medical schools. Her music has seen a resurgence of interest. Her impact and influence can still be felt today. </span> </p><p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">* Offering the tenth child as a tithe to the church was a common practice, and many scholars believe Hildegard was the tenth child in her family, but we lack surviving documentation of 9 older siblings, so we can't state this with complete certainty.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Sources</b></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Brady, Erika. <i>Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems.</i> 1 ed. Utah State University Press, 2001. <i>Project MUSE</i> <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9398">muse.jhu.edu/book/9398</a>. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Campbell, Olivia, <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-nun/">Abortion remedies from a Medieval Catholic nun (!)</a>, JSTOR Daily, October 13, 2021.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Janega, Eleanor, <a href="https://going-medieval.com/tag/hildegard-of-bingen/">Going Medieval blog</a>, posts tagged 'Hildegard of Bingen,' accessed October, 2023. <br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hay, K.A., "Hildegard's Medicine: A Systematic Science of Medieval Europe." Proceedings of the 17th Annual History of Medicine Days, March 7th and 8th, 2008, Heath Science Centre, Calgary, AB.<span> <span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 50px; top: 589.889px; transform: scaleX(0.999392);">http://hdl.handle.net/1880/47483</span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 50px; top: 618.222px; transform: scaleX(1.00258);"> Downloaded from PRISM Repository, University of Calgary</span></span></span></div><p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen">Hildegard of Bingen</a>, Wikipedia, accessed October, 2023</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Johnston, Sophie., <a href="https://blue-stocking.org.uk/2008/01/01/hildegard-of-bingen/">Hildegard of Bingen</a>, Bluestocking Online Journal of Women's History, January 1, 2008. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Lockett, Charles J., <a href="https://www.medievalware.com/blog/hildegard-von-bingen-medieval-scientist/">Was Hildegard von Bingen the First Medieval Scientist?</a> Medieval Blog, July 18, 2022 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/tag/hildegard-of-bingen/">The Medieval Garden Enclosed, posts tagged 'Hildegard of Bingen'</a>, The Metropolitan Museum of Art blog, accessed October, 2023.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library">Mount Sinai Health Library</a>, accessed October, 2023.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Sharratt, Mary, "<a href="https://feminismandreligion.com/2015/05/13/hildegard-the-healer/">Hildegard the Healer</a>," on Feminism and Religion, May 13, 2015.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Singer, Charles. 'The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard (1098-1180)', in Studies in the History and Method of Science, edited by Charles Singer, Oxford at the Claredon Press, 1917.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Stefanidis,<sup> </sup>Ioannis, Theodoros Eleftheriadis, Maria Efthymiadi, Maria Kalientzidou, and Elias Valiakos, <i>Remedies for Kidney Ailments in Physica by Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), </i><a href="http://www.ectrx.org/supplement/2023/21/6/2">Volume: 21 Issue: 6 June 2023 - Supplement - 2</a>, Pages: 53 - 56, June 2023.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Sweet, Victoria, 'Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine', <span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid6"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 135.917px; top: 428.222px; transform: scaleX(1.15929);">Bulletin of the History of Medicine</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid7"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 487.297px; top: 428.222px;"> </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 491.55px; top: 428.55px;">,</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid8"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 498.69px; top: 428.55px;"> </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 506.483px; top: 428.55px; transform: scaleX(1.03045);">Fall 1999</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid9"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 591.333px; top: 428.55px;">,</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid10"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 598.473px; top: 428.55px;"> </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 606.267px; top: 428.55px; transform: scaleX(1.0771);">Vol. 73, No. 3 (Fall 1999), pp.</span></span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid11"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 60px; top: 448.55px; transform: scaleX(0.998276);"> 381-403</span></span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid13"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 60px; top: 481.883px; transform: scaleX(1.08746);"> Published by:</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid14"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 190.64px; top: 481.883px;"> </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 198.433px; top: 481.883px; transform: scaleX(1.11742);">The Johns Hopkins University Press</span></span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid16"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 60px; top: 521.883px; transform: scaleX(1.02794);">, Stable URL:</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page1222R_mcid17"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 170.88px; top: 521.883px;"> </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 178.683px; top: 521.883px; transform: scaleX(1.16386);">https://www.jstor.org/stable/44445287</span></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Ramos-e-Silva, </span><span style="font-size: small;">Marcia., </span><span style="font-size: small;">Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179): “the light of her people
and of her time”. International Journal of Dermatology 1999;
38(4):315-320.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span><span class="nowrap"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 70.8643px; top: 347.117px; transform: scaleX(1.03353);">Uehleke</span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 230.579px; top: 345.073px; transform: scaleX(1.00347);">, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span><span class="nowrap"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 230.579px; top: 345.073px; transform: scaleX(1.00347);"><span><span><span class="nowrap"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 70.8643px; top: 347.117px; transform: scaleX(1.03353);">Bernhard, </span></span></span></span></span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 274.414px; top: 347.117px; transform: scaleX(1.05705);">Werner Hopfenmueller</span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 484.816px; top: 345.073px;">, </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 503.599px; top: 347.117px; transform: scaleX(1.02175);">Rainer Stange</span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 635.749px; top: 345.073px;"> </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 654.534px; top: 347.117px; transform: scaleX(1.03477);">and Reinhard Saller, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="nowrap"><a href="https://karger.com/cmr/search-results?page=1&q=Are%20the%20Correct%20Herbal%20Claims%20by%20Hildegard%20von%20Bingen%20Only%20Lucky%20Strikes%3F%20A%20New%20Statistical%20Approach&fl_SiteID=1000049"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 70.8643px; top: 256.84px; transform: scaleX(1.0172);">Are the Correct Herbal Claims by Hildegard von Bingen</span></a><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 70.8643px; top: 291.84px; transform: scaleX(1.03458);"><a href="https://karger.com/cmr/search-results?page=1&q=Are%20the%20Correct%20Herbal%20Claims%20by%20Hildegard%20von%20Bingen%20Only%20Lucky%20Strikes%3F%20A%20New%20Statistical%20Approach&fl_SiteID=1000049"> Only Lucky Strikes? A New Statistical Approach</a>. </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://karger.com/cmr">Complementary Medicine Research</a><span><i> Forschende Komplementärmedizin / Research in Complementary Medicine</i> (2012) 19 (4): 187–190. </span><a href="https://doi.org/10.1159/000341548" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1159/000341548</a><span class="sri-date-label"> Published Online:</span> 01 April 2012</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-13720519095612429552023-09-15T14:13:00.001-04:002023-09-15T14:13:00.140-04:00New Natural History Prints for SciArtSeptember<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIE3moAxQjTs4Cvt3qmpkQ03ljxHOuXMaTD5G7eM7YhlKYffNZyTFDnorLwmCWlWAkMS211nIp3TYksywtKUUeR5WWGqJmKFh2dAb-O3XoZEV7GV50fcQUEfgOoksWv2-hVQa1fHA0mHB2JUcRmF_d1QhvFMItY4YqyuipW4y0phz9aruBQjC8qLCG0ru/s1346/CochinealSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Cochineal, linocut 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1346" data-original-width="1346" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIE3moAxQjTs4Cvt3qmpkQ03ljxHOuXMaTD5G7eM7YhlKYffNZyTFDnorLwmCWlWAkMS211nIp3TYksywtKUUeR5WWGqJmKFh2dAb-O3XoZEV7GV50fcQUEfgOoksWv2-hVQa1fHA0mHB2JUcRmF_d1QhvFMItY4YqyuipW4y0phz9aruBQjC8qLCG0ru/w320-h320/CochinealSq.jpg" title="Cochineal, linocut 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cochineal, linocut 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table></p><p> </p><p>For the SciArtSeptember prompt carmine, a bright red pigment derived from carminic acid,
traditionally harvested from cochineal, a sessile parasite on Opuntia
cacti in South America, north through to Mexico and the southwest US, I made this linocut.
The cochineal are laboriously collected by brushing them off the pads of prickly
pear cacti. The insect makes carminic acid to deter predators but it’s
precisely what attracts people, who dry them out, extract the acid and
mix it with aluminum or calcium salts to make carmine dye.<br /><br />The
dye was important historically for textiles (prior to the invention of
synthetic dyes in the 19th century). Aztec and Maya peoples were using
it as early as the second century BCE. It was used in Peru from the
Middle Horizon period (600-1000 CE). Moctezuma II demanded yearly
tributes of cochineal dye by the 15th century. Aztecs used it in
manuscripts. Colonial powers exploited the dye in the 16th century. It
produced in places controlled by Spain and Portugal. It was the second
most valuable export after silver. The British began using it to dye
their red coats and were frustrated by the Mexican monopoly on trade.
There have been various disastrous attempts to export the insects and
dye production to places like Australia.<br /><br />Today, in an effort to avoid synthetic dyes, cochineal is used in food and cosmetics and it may be in your lipstick.</p><p> </p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_1XEdrFD6YuTjztXmVvmHvR4OF-UA9Lkt69ktZsfdJclA7-Zu64mFT9SVZvhkzTHyiyuA0fEdVYqCWqXhssjNZvlNEcfSp6ismkRBQWC-tOA32a0rCbSZdwQOuwmthHjM0upDMHQEUtPMGKX6bS-bi6G3xlLaZxyGzp-0iYhc9jgEeCiWOHSUWF4nFx36/s1352/HummingbirdClearwingSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Hummingbird Clearwing, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1352" data-original-width="1352" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_1XEdrFD6YuTjztXmVvmHvR4OF-UA9Lkt69ktZsfdJclA7-Zu64mFT9SVZvhkzTHyiyuA0fEdVYqCWqXhssjNZvlNEcfSp6ismkRBQWC-tOA32a0rCbSZdwQOuwmthHjM0upDMHQEUtPMGKX6bS-bi6G3xlLaZxyGzp-0iYhc9jgEeCiWOHSUWF4nFx36/w320-h320/HummingbirdClearwingSq.jpg" title="Hummingbird Clearwing, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hummingbird Clearwing, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </p><p>This is a hand-printed lino block print of the charming Hummingbird
Clearwing moth (<i>Hermaris thysbe</i>) seeking pollen from cherry blossoms.
The olive-headed burgundy moth has transparent wings (though colour can
be variable). It beats its wings rapidly to hover above flowers, like a
hummingbird, meaning it is often confused with a hummingbird or bee. It
has a 5 cm wingspan. Its bulky abdomen has lead to its adorable nickname
"the flying shrimp." The caterpillar likes to feed on cherry amongst
other things and as a moth, it feeds on a wide range of flowers, with a
preference for pink and purple, so I chose to illustrate it with cherry
blossoms.<br /><br />Its range covers most of North America. It is a migratory species which is common here in Ontario, and in the eastern US.<br /><br />Its
scientific name <i>Hermaris thysbe</i> is likely a reference to Thisbe, half
of a pair of ill-fated lovers in Ovid's Metamorphoses and her
blood-stained scarf. It's a reference to the moth's reddish-brown
colour. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixnpurMFulc2cRCUK97HTaxnm3Cyk_8EiEIRp1Xf6MWFD99Y1fFgh2iv_6vclUUQ2Xt7ICEkpyzlR-33vMOj7gWRp3yyvHYqwQKOOID8sWkzM9bxqDCfNy-WMLrSgVbAC1RlPvPXv3np63hLOEecP3CU2wYgaSNThXVooTepOTMflEHqCt4U54ji9vFHwY/s2025/TalonDrypoint.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Talon, tinted drypoint print by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="2025" data-original-width="1472" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixnpurMFulc2cRCUK97HTaxnm3Cyk_8EiEIRp1Xf6MWFD99Y1fFgh2iv_6vclUUQ2Xt7ICEkpyzlR-33vMOj7gWRp3yyvHYqwQKOOID8sWkzM9bxqDCfNy-WMLrSgVbAC1RlPvPXv3np63hLOEecP3CU2wYgaSNThXVooTepOTMflEHqCt4U54ji9vFHwY/w466-h640/TalonDrypoint.jpg" title="Talon, tinted drypoint print by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="466" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Talon, tinted drypoint print by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>For the #SciArtSeptember prompt talon, I tried drypoint using an aluminum pop can! I cut it open with strong kitchen scissors and incised a drawing of a harpy eagle talon with an exacto knife. I used some small leftover rectangles of mat board to get black relief printing ink into the lines and wiped away the excess with junkmail on newsprint - so the entire process was done using what would otherwise be garbage. I printed it using my small etching press, and tinted the talon by hand with gouache. <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-78071357814120261512023-09-14T11:07:00.000-04:002023-09-14T11:07:50.471-04:00Mary the Jewess The Mother of Alchemy<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1561592609/linocut-mary-the-jewess-mother-of?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694630035838" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Mary the Jewess, Mother of Alchemy, linocut 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1695" data-original-width="1695" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikOTcLXYQAGAmbCybn_-mjKQTuuq6_xxRtglNw_DsMB4wbTOl4ZARH_EZMGgJjTsFHM5LRRcZZfTyEweMcyfOGMkc4pUFLYUw5yJuw8-H8CtGmVn8P8WEyFAzLK-nasPtb__RymG1KaiohnIy-2_TwzbJQYly9yUx_1HKUyyINEvg1CFPk3WofOsfBTg7V/w640-h640/MaryTheJewessAlchemySq.jpg" title="Mary the Jewess, Mother of Alchemy, linocut 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1561592609/linocut-mary-the-jewess-mother-of?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694630035838">Mary the Jewess, Mother of Alchemy</a><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1561592609/linocut-mary-the-jewess-mother-of?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694630035838">, linocut 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</a></td></tr></tbody></table></p><p><br /></p><p>This is my hand-printed linocut portrait of the earliest recorded
alchemist: Mary the Jewess (also known as Maria Hebraea, or Miriam, or
Maria Prophetissa). The ancient alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis (who
lived in Hellenistic Egypt around 300 CE), cites her research and innovations and calls her "the divine Maria". He even states that she opened an academy for studying alchemy, and taught, "the inner, concealed nature of the metals could be discerned by a complex alchemical process that was revealed to her by God himself and that was to be transmitted only to the Jewish people." She must have
predated him, in the early centuries of the common era, and several
scholars suspect she lived in Alexandria, Egyptian in the first century.
Zosimos relates that she wrote a treatise called "On Furnaces and
Apparatuses" and she invented, or at least described ovens, apparatuses
for cooking and distilling, and other alchemical experimentation, made
of metal, clay, and glass with joints sealed using fat, wax, starch
paste, and fatty clay. She favored glass vessels which allowed one to observe reactions without disturbing them and provided some protection fro poisonous materials like mercury, sulfurous and arsenic compounds. Amongst inventions attributed to her are the
bain-marie (named in her honour, essentially a double boiler, still used
in cooking and chemistry today), the kerotakis (which allowed one to heat items while
collecting vapors) and the tribikos (a kind of alembic with three arms
that was used to obtain substances purified by distillation, still used
in chemistry labs today). The kerotakis was an extractor for vapors which had a metallic palette supported inside to hold samples on which the vapors would act. When working properly it made an airtight seal and we get the term "hermetically sealed" from its use in the "hermetic arts" (that is, in alchemy). It played a role in alchemy and the advent of chemistry up to the late19th century when German chemist Franz von Soxhlet produced the modern, modified kerotakis, known as the Soxhlet extractor in 1879, which is used to this day. I've included these three devices in my
portrait. Her name also comes down to us in the term "Mary's Black" for the iron(II) sulfide coating on metal after using the kerotakis. She appears in the writings of other alchemists in the Greek
tradition, like Olympiodorus the Younger (c. 495 – 570) and Christianos in the 7th century, and in the writings of
early Arab authors. Arab writer al-Habīb (dates unknown) must have had access to a now lost Hellenistic treatise by or about Mary. The tenth century Arab author Ibn Umail quotes Mary's books with information not found in other sources, suggesting he possessed her actual writings.<br /><br />Sadly we know very little about Mary's life,
but some of her books are quoted by others, and she casts quite the long shadow across centuries of alchemy. Like other alchemists, her
words about her explorations of substances are quite mystical and hard
to understand. Her axiom, known as the 'Axiom of Maria': "One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and fourth achieves unity; thus two are but one," was quoted by many alchemists who followed her; C.G. Jung called it a leitmotiv which runs seventeen centuries of alchemy. It's enigmatic and unscientific to the modern reader, but during her life, philosophers in the Mediterranean held an Aristotelian view of mater. She was expressing the idea that all materials were one. Aristotelians believed that mater was composed of four elements (air, fire, earth, and water), with four qualities in opposing pairs (hot/cold and wet/dry). It was commonly believed that by appropriately adjusting the proportions of the four elements by adjusting the balance of the qualities, a material could be transformed into any other. Alchemists in Egypt believed that a base metal like lead could be transmuted into gold with four steps: 1) melanosis, or blackening, to kill the base metal; 2) leukosis,
or whitening the metal (using arsenic compounds); 3) xanthosis, or yellowing
silver into gold (which might involve sulfur); and 4) iosis, or making the metal violet, which was purported to make it transformable into other metals. Much of their exploration involved producing these colour changes in metals.<br /></p><p>Alchemists disguised their works to avoid accusations of
witchcraft or sorcery or to keep their research findings secret from
most people, so it is hard for us to interpret. Her interests were broader that we tend to assume for alchemists; she was interested in more than attempting to transmute lead into gold or producing the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life. Alchemy was more a religious view of life for her. She spoke of joining metals of different sexes, or the
death of metals - things which do not fit with our modern scientific
knowledge. Nonetheless some people credit her with discovering hydrochloric acid.
She is credited with inventing the silver sulfide process, still used in
metalworking today. She is believed to have discovered <i>caput mortum</i>, a
dark purple dye. Though alchemists' understanding of materials was not
scientific, the methodologies and apparatus developed definitely
involved scientific thinking and form the foundation of what was to
become chemistry. Mary's "<i>On Furnaces and Apparatuses</i>" contains the
first description of a still. The instruments attributed to her, and her
innovations for sealing apparatus were well-designed and played a role
in chemistry and cooking for many many centuries or even persist today.
And that is truly extraordinary!<br /><br />My colour scheme is influenced
by the deep purple of <i>caput mortum</i>. In Arab texts she was called
"Daughter of Plato" - a term used in Western alchemy for white sulfur,
so I also use a yellow-gold colour in my portrait. There's a portrait of
her in German physician and alchemist Michael Maier's book '<i>Symbola
Aurea Mensae Duodecim Nationum</i>,' but since it was published in 1617, I
don't think it actually provides any insight to her appearance or
clothing. I was more influenced in imagining what she would have looked
like by researching the clothing of Hellenistic Jews of the first to
third century of the common era and the frescos of the Dura-Europos
synagogue built in Syria in 244 CE. I made this print for the #SciArtSeptember prompt: alchemy.<br /></p><p><b>References </b></p><p>Cohen, Stephen Michael. "Maria the Jewess." <i>Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women</i>.
25 June 2021. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on September 14, 2023)
<https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/maria-jewess>.</p><p></p><p><b></b></p><p>Hendrickson, Kristin. Maria the Prophetess: Mother of Alchemy, lecture given at Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, Arizona, as part of the ACMRS Fearless Females series program, on September 20, 2013, https://www.medievalists.net/2015/07/maria-the-prophetess-mother-of-alchemy/ </p><p>Lewis, Jone Johnson. "Mary the Jewess, First Known Alchemist."
ThoughtCo, Aug. 25, 2020,
thoughtco.com/mary-the-jewess-biography-3530346. <b><br /></b></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_the_Jewess">Mary the Jewess</a>, Wikipedia, accessed September, 2023 <br /></p><p>Patai, Raphael. The Jewish Alchemists: A History Source Book. <cite class="citation book cs1" id="CITEREFPatai1995">New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 60–91. <a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-691-00642-0" title="Special:BookSources/978-0-691-00642-0"><bdi>978-0-691-00642-0</bdi></a>. 1995</cite></p><p>Sacks, Harold. Mary the Jewess and the Origins of Chemistry, SciHi Blog, May 8, 2020. http://scihi.org/mary-the-jewess-origins-chemistry/</p><p></p><p>van der Horst, P.W. (2002). Maria Alchemista, the First Female Jewish
Author.
In: Berger, S., Brocke, M., Zwiep, I. (eds) Zutot
2001. Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3730-2_6</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-60112221115996050422023-09-07T14:18:00.002-04:002023-09-07T14:55:01.764-04:00Some SciArt for September and New Things for ... the uh, end of the year<p>I've been taking part in #SciArtSeptember for the last several years. Check out the hashtag on Instagram!* Since I have such a big portfolio of prints I am often re-sharing art to match the daily prompts but each year I make a lot of new science art each September. Here's some of my new work.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnyOaCG-E5xK8WW5aPhQigltcdULgyDDbY3t_amCPhoCALH_8t0nq3g9rKsMsPzUWV_HRgISHf5sf9-hoi-lVcotfk8ww37GOLPuR0FoX6yyW-ZbUGSVteg_U8_Gwymcn9-75N8MPrb_FZuPL8058lNJQBlh1OW8TSgoU9wBodilZ6YFplV7W68c8iAUe3/s1715/VincetoxicumSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Vincetoxicum rossicum, gel plate print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1715" data-original-width="1715" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnyOaCG-E5xK8WW5aPhQigltcdULgyDDbY3t_amCPhoCALH_8t0nq3g9rKsMsPzUWV_HRgISHf5sf9-hoi-lVcotfk8ww37GOLPuR0FoX6yyW-ZbUGSVteg_U8_Gwymcn9-75N8MPrb_FZuPL8058lNJQBlh1OW8TSgoU9wBodilZ6YFplV7W68c8iAUe3/w640-h640/VincetoxicumSq.jpg" title="Vincetoxicum rossicum, gel plate print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vincetoxicum rossicum, gel plate print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="_aacl _aaco _aacu _aacx _aad7 _aade" style="text-align: left;">For the <a class="x1i10hfl xjbqb8w x6umtig x1b1mbwd xaqea5y xav7gou x9f619 x1ypdohk xt0psk2 xe8uvvx xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r xexx8yu x4uap5 x18d9i69 xkhd6sd x16tdsg8 x1hl2dhg xggy1nq x1a2a7pz _aa9_ _a6hd" href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/sciartseptember/" role="link" tabindex="0">#SciArtSeptember</a>
theme “strangling” I made gel plate prints of <i>Vincetoxicum rossicum</i>, also
known as European swallowwort, or Dog-strangling Vine. Introduced to the
northeastern US gardens in the mid-1800s, it’s become wildly invasive
in south and central Ontario. While it doesn’t actually strangle dogs,
it can be a risk to native plants and animals. It’s illegal to buy,
sell, trade or purposely sell dog-strangling vine in Ontario;
nonetheless I found this unwelcome plant in my garden. It can produce
28,000 seeds per square metre which are spread by the wind. They can
crowd out native plants and mats of tangled vines make it hard to even
walk through the forest. The leaves and roots can be toxic so animals
avoid them and thus end up putting even more pressure on yummier native
plants. They are also a threat to the monarch butterfly, a species at
risk; their eggs laid on the vines do not survive to adulthood.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipOSCHMkox_fJy-fzitsj1aUOZMMZuO7bASlqfEEncAvmh_rffy74NSs3Igla1LkpAofI3pz5wCGKHI4Tbg3j5B-FDUG0xKg16I-M3WzC51ABqeuIzRn5NuHYGET6Eaxq3hE_lP58CmsH4WxqyrKNTMHipAHIFfKaKF5crgn8Cn2BGc_MPfblLZMngTE4t/s1822/SwallowwortSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="European swallowwort, gel plate print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1822" data-original-width="1822" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipOSCHMkox_fJy-fzitsj1aUOZMMZuO7bASlqfEEncAvmh_rffy74NSs3Igla1LkpAofI3pz5wCGKHI4Tbg3j5B-FDUG0xKg16I-M3WzC51ABqeuIzRn5NuHYGET6Eaxq3hE_lP58CmsH4WxqyrKNTMHipAHIFfKaKF5crgn8Cn2BGc_MPfblLZMngTE4t/w640-h640/SwallowwortSq.jpg" title="European swallowwort, gel plate print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">European Swallow-wort, gel plate print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br />If
you find them in your garden (here in North America) you should dig it
up and place it in a black plastic bag; don’t add it to compost or it
can spread. Or, if you are like me, use it as free art supplies!<br /></div><p></p><p>Tomorrow, the prompt is simian, so here's a sneak peak at my post.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwN2hZy2VFpJElSpJtMhtpKt8etyn2Vz99p11U7kuAhKP0xM-unxyln-DQt26qr9rAkf6cZ1saytsSVZGJVmzfODNJ4UZMgGhitGZTaWKS7gTly1ANKmac-QXlCMWUi_o5OdqZK8GA19UPwMAEab4xXyOVjj1V3FBdWg_lKIAxSl3yWCJZeOelo0uxRX0I/s1735/LemursSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="A Conspiracy of Lemurs, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1735" data-original-width="1735" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwN2hZy2VFpJElSpJtMhtpKt8etyn2Vz99p11U7kuAhKP0xM-unxyln-DQt26qr9rAkf6cZ1saytsSVZGJVmzfODNJ4UZMgGhitGZTaWKS7gTly1ANKmac-QXlCMWUi_o5OdqZK8GA19UPwMAEab4xXyOVjj1V3FBdWg_lKIAxSl3yWCJZeOelo0uxRX0I/w640-h640/LemursSq.jpg" title="A Conspiracy of Lemurs, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1547400472/a-conspiracy-of-lemurs-linocut-terms-of?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694112892041">A Conspiracy of Lemurs, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>I decided to extend my ongoing series of Terms of Venery prints by adding a primate. The term for a group of lemurs is irresistible: a conspiracy. Looking at photos of ring-tailed lemurs I can imagine where the term arose. They are very social and live in large groups, huddling to socialize and for warmth. I wanted them to look like they were up to something and made the word lemur with their famously striped tails. Endemic to Madagascar, these wet-nosed primates are sadly endangered due to habitat loss.</p><p>I've also been thinking ahead, and though I don't mention [REDACTED winter holidays] until after Halloween, because it can all be a bit too much hype, if you like to send cards, check this out. I have new and returning [REDACTED winter holidays] cards <a href="https://minouette.etsy.com">in my shop</a>! It's good to order early to receive them with plenty of time to send them out to your friends and loved ones.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1547260730/twelve-days-of-christmas-carol-set-of-5?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694110517628" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="12 days of Christmas card by Ele Willoughby" border="0" data-original-height="2786" data-original-width="2548" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWpVvtYlUcuI9cqmCwC3FEo5rSSPLzN6nhkhOJS2k3kebdWfGfn9stQT6Ng1nya3FrXuYM12tywVxZ5r1K4w2plXMzrWk-3yH0pL0mQAa4uBZq3hX2N41fObyEHb3cp29RHYKLned62cfSswAwKH3ROkSkx6CzU2GE2pbj0SdO9BChzAHh9deKigHWtMdo/w366-h400/12DaysCard1.jpeg" title="12 days of Christmas card by Ele Willoughby" width="366" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1547260730/twelve-days-of-christmas-carol-set-of-5?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694110517628" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="12 days of Christmas by Ele Willoughby" border="0" data-original-height="2184" data-original-width="1416" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6hBhsvnljA0YZt3HHng6R5-dL2rBybzr7_pU-r7Jg7evQVMuIcDWn41YHMG-W4Uc0mkR1bla8QQAqyTFCg68osrahp0OSRal9QKN2ipuO9L3_g2lzewrFF-8UhRV386ztf_veF9UaEle8oZj42fd8t2yNJFIx1ZVZdyehgxnv8hRrqfIhf_ebqfZ60Y8j/w414-h640/TwelveDaysOfChristmas.jpg" title="12 days of Christmas by Ele Willoughby" width="414" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1547260730/twelve-days-of-christmas-carol-set-of-5?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694110517628">My 12 Days of Christmas card design - find it in my shop!</a></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1547260730/twelve-days-of-christmas-carol-set-of-5?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694110517628"><br /></a></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://minouette.etsy.com/ca/listing/1547260730/twelve-days-of-christmas-carol-set-of-5?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1694110517628"><br /></a></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>*I'm also posting on Bluesky, where I'm @minouette and at
@minouette@spore.social on Mastodon. Sadly, I think I am going to have
to remove my account on what is left of Twitter.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-35338832975828072322023-08-29T14:44:00.001-04:002023-08-29T14:44:00.138-04:00Water is Life: Interconnection<p> Local non-profit Water Docs Film Festival asked me if I would share their #ARTivist challenge for science art about issues of water and climate change. I shared some existing work which fit their themes and I wanted to create new work for the final theme: "Water is Life: Interconnection." </p><p>At first I was a bit stumped. It's such a big topic. Water is central to all life on Earth. How can I represent that centrality, all life, the water cycle in one image? I think this is an instance where less is more. When I was in New Brunswick, I made a point to take a number of photos of lake water, as a reference for future art. I put this to work, creating a cyanotype with a negative of one of my photos and the theme itself as text, "WATER IS LIFE".</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQmD_At4r_Fat5MOjg1bsjdJ-fa9KZ6B2_eF0f2d0MjtzAO4L1pxGjsqzUM0J38JZAhzTOmdRfzMVi4khsaRq_4PxI8yeBFrKWL2EAF9KV1XHyq8GlxEBsPdBV1fsnXfKZOyOcZxahuNQ5Kq1_49RPA4GSrXvuszeNIrTdRMml_BXa3GdfIzwRoDzd3Xnj/s2824/WaterIsLife.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Water Is Life, cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="2824" data-original-width="2199" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQmD_At4r_Fat5MOjg1bsjdJ-fa9KZ6B2_eF0f2d0MjtzAO4L1pxGjsqzUM0J38JZAhzTOmdRfzMVi4khsaRq_4PxI8yeBFrKWL2EAF9KV1XHyq8GlxEBsPdBV1fsnXfKZOyOcZxahuNQ5Kq1_49RPA4GSrXvuszeNIrTdRMml_BXa3GdfIzwRoDzd3Xnj/w498-h640/WaterIsLife.jpg" title="Water Is Life, cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="498" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Water Is Life, cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Then, as I was thinking about the inescapable this summer: the way so much of this country is and has been literally on fire, I began to conceive of this as one half of a diptych. All 13 provinces and territories have seen forest fires in this, the worst forest fire season we have ever experienced. So far 150,504 km squared, or as much as 4% of the forested area of Canada, a huge country with much greater proportion forested areas than most countries. This is an area larger than the entire country of Greece. This is about 5 times the average yearly area affected by forest fires and much of the continent has been bathed in smoke through the summer. </p><p>Climate change causes warmer and drier weather and has radically increased the risk of forest fire. We can expect extreme weather events with increased frequency and severity. Many regions have been left praying for rain.</p><p>I made this linocut to express the flip side of "water is life"; "No water no life." I used my lino block centered on the Arctic, including much of Canada, and painted it with flames, then printed the text on top.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVXwCIt6yWu3kXuBJYPEJ2AutTPA5ASvpcAxBOr7YlLJg7-wz_KFP4gJmhswyXZD_ZaxADEBZgrjnwtpO094VglNVPxhqSLWneWxsxvlY5bNNwp01nWRIWhYVUAKZ4XgGLRzSf_XL9vMUhEsTVhv0u8FNNxdcXIKMncTK7e8SU8T0YutG_vfdHRQcbcAB/s2863/NoWater.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="No Water No Life, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="2863" data-original-width="2181" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVXwCIt6yWu3kXuBJYPEJ2AutTPA5ASvpcAxBOr7YlLJg7-wz_KFP4gJmhswyXZD_ZaxADEBZgrjnwtpO094VglNVPxhqSLWneWxsxvlY5bNNwp01nWRIWhYVUAKZ4XgGLRzSf_XL9vMUhEsTVhv0u8FNNxdcXIKMncTK7e8SU8T0YutG_vfdHRQcbcAB/w488-h640/NoWater.jpg" title="No Water No Life, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="488" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">No Water No Life, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>So, as a diptych:</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPUxEYdv81ElhNuocedYzrIVg9ldGPnZQuSCNLSiOrlLluDRezB4ukytgSrCekxdMhG5mKDvO7Y1mRBgS-HduTwCnC9BsZ5HDc1gDdEeEkiLo-pQk7nrUXNCD4b-2mjcTj7ZqosAaMJ9dwJ9IaanfrcEaQZkLY4SAcROvpy-rLTxxszxfnRguLo6Io3EHM/s2358/WaterDiptych.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Water diptych, cyanotype and linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1516" data-original-width="2358" height="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPUxEYdv81ElhNuocedYzrIVg9ldGPnZQuSCNLSiOrlLluDRezB4ukytgSrCekxdMhG5mKDvO7Y1mRBgS-HduTwCnC9BsZ5HDc1gDdEeEkiLo-pQk7nrUXNCD4b-2mjcTj7ZqosAaMJ9dwJ9IaanfrcEaQZkLY4SAcROvpy-rLTxxszxfnRguLo6Io3EHM/w640-h412/WaterDiptych.jpg" title="Water diptych, cyanotype and linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Water diptych, cyanotype and linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-37190625442389299422023-08-18T13:53:00.003-04:002023-08-18T13:53:40.332-04:00Multimedia with Kites<p> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ooGFunRzYcIGKWWELuZyKrYn1DAoLmF6B1DPsZZDvGYsv4gE-T9XuUnKpASo2CP-h-vcHTLyp_U-D4I8pwHjLVbuIx-_QAyQOLYmV8t6rabJdFoyqMg3hcaiYXEfk3wqLJatmLHBwK4MoHsPnKD9ZPahYR-IzP3RNc6pD0kQUPNIz1NAkQt341pk3hHQ/s1106/Kites-2sq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1106" data-original-width="1106" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ooGFunRzYcIGKWWELuZyKrYn1DAoLmF6B1DPsZZDvGYsv4gE-T9XuUnKpASo2CP-h-vcHTLyp_U-D4I8pwHjLVbuIx-_QAyQOLYmV8t6rabJdFoyqMg3hcaiYXEfk3wqLJatmLHBwK4MoHsPnKD9ZPahYR-IzP3RNc6pD0kQUPNIz1NAkQt341pk3hHQ/w640-h640/Kites-2sq.jpg" title="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwQ5m1J1Wqn2yXtujy6aVR97V4PfjvNX1OQKnNG2eww67qHRZxUAtAJW2rXoxU_7i6ZR__6CmbH56O6SgzrS7ITenaDp-7cLxewzbfqjtaXxerTfR8pUyKm6ohxTgSKJdhrLEybdi0YFacbW8YYQbDhg5fqQUTiHKhuv3p5DLJoU5C5nDjsBWoy16P3YC4/s1105/Kites-1sq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1105" data-original-width="1105" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwQ5m1J1Wqn2yXtujy6aVR97V4PfjvNX1OQKnNG2eww67qHRZxUAtAJW2rXoxU_7i6ZR__6CmbH56O6SgzrS7ITenaDp-7cLxewzbfqjtaXxerTfR8pUyKm6ohxTgSKJdhrLEybdi0YFacbW8YYQbDhg5fqQUTiHKhuv3p5DLJoU5C5nDjsBWoy16P3YC4/w640-h640/Kites-1sq.jpg" title="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqj00vSAGg6vtEYN3Ezx0EDrtqG_wOgmG1RMDTGCQcYOi_3DYPPrgDv4UBb68OUMJ6gr_Wa8XjXiO_mKp0yY0zen9i190bDxBA--GgRLUHz3A8u_EWGkcqIMiyAOVI7HJemIaadi4bi42xThaZ4IvUUXmPrOkZn9fYBjvocDvifzYoJrmmVJUzbNGpdFKP/s1150/Kites6sq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1150" data-original-width="1150" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqj00vSAGg6vtEYN3Ezx0EDrtqG_wOgmG1RMDTGCQcYOi_3DYPPrgDv4UBb68OUMJ6gr_Wa8XjXiO_mKp0yY0zen9i190bDxBA--GgRLUHz3A8u_EWGkcqIMiyAOVI7HJemIaadi4bi42xThaZ4IvUUXmPrOkZn9fYBjvocDvifzYoJrmmVJUzbNGpdFKP/w640-h640/Kites6sq.jpg" title="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi and embroidery thread, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Cf7L3Oc2bKJ_HbJHvj7eWoLhU5q0jIXcIBU8V8AMU4TeEwl-WQr2IC_KbS0BB5592YrVkXbQ9OOuV_8hDDrNk89ZLfWqR7K-YczA3S-tIlWdlFKVaggfMuUD6V3NT_zAo-v2buRo08ESr0rvH-v6ksPMv0FSFrklSLu_BYrwu0j2FaQAFjNG1DZH1xGn/s1501/Kites5sq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1501" data-original-width="1501" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Cf7L3Oc2bKJ_HbJHvj7eWoLhU5q0jIXcIBU8V8AMU4TeEwl-WQr2IC_KbS0BB5592YrVkXbQ9OOuV_8hDDrNk89ZLfWqR7K-YczA3S-tIlWdlFKVaggfMuUD6V3NT_zAo-v2buRo08ESr0rvH-v6ksPMv0FSFrklSLu_BYrwu0j2FaQAFjNG1DZH1xGn/w640-h640/Kites5sq.jpg" title="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy4_Jj_Uh4V5cKEbZZzS1wXiqPYj-2BXCCCeTwAZ0g6NQtyumhy23N7ICeORWSCWDoatgCukrzuS78AfduESknuJ0qVVXClK42cFq7gvjXAJZuXfGk6ffh6OBdqCmsIaTcVrsiZozgn7nmn0xyjXyNXuMG9SKNcpxx9aQAFGvPmFvOw1oxzzlfiTCZXCKL/s2153/Kites4sq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" border="0" data-original-height="2153" data-original-width="2153" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy4_Jj_Uh4V5cKEbZZzS1wXiqPYj-2BXCCCeTwAZ0g6NQtyumhy23N7ICeORWSCWDoatgCukrzuS78AfduESknuJ0qVVXClK42cFq7gvjXAJZuXfGk6ffh6OBdqCmsIaTcVrsiZozgn7nmn0xyjXyNXuMG9SKNcpxx9aQAFGvPmFvOw1oxzzlfiTCZXCKL/w640-h640/Kites4sq.jpg" title="Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linocut kites on cyanotype sky with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr></tbody></table></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeQY0C0kTwm39awtOwvH6vaRuval9y-zrB52df16JWB-8FH7nr6PhMs8tvTZqfL0DoZKE6cWdf-y4wAxTm9SjRU1AkeTG0iSmF54fNeu7fR-tl-tv488eq3WWb27uOOB1Z_YCEWamLOnom_Y2d_p-kppl2nxFgQz2OY3VzKhyMvHwKvB7gcSvQ_i7o8tg1/s1884/Kites-3sq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="kites, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1884" data-original-width="1884" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeQY0C0kTwm39awtOwvH6vaRuval9y-zrB52df16JWB-8FH7nr6PhMs8tvTZqfL0DoZKE6cWdf-y4wAxTm9SjRU1AkeTG0iSmF54fNeu7fR-tl-tv488eq3WWb27uOOB1Z_YCEWamLOnom_Y2d_p-kppl2nxFgQz2OY3VzKhyMvHwKvB7gcSvQ_i7o8tg1/w400-h400/Kites-3sq.jpg" title="kites, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linocut kites with collaged washi, Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2023</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
This is one of a series, each unique, of my hand made cyanotypes on watercolour paper (14" x 11") with an image of a cloud-filled sky overprinted with my linocut print of several kites, and wind-socks each collaged with beautiful Japanese washi papers. I made one without cyanotype and on one I hand-sewed embroidery thread for all the strings.
The carp-shaped Koinobori wind socks (also known as satsuki-nobori) are flown in Japan to celebrate Tango no sekku, or Children's Day each May 5.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-35471867354444952742023-06-30T13:02:00.001-04:002023-06-30T13:02:00.144-04:00Cyanotype Experiments<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwFzRlmmK3F9NMcwEaqYhk9xfslgRSchTB5ObIqljS5i_OiEJiBN7bLRlS7UX9JIuH4ncPbaR9UhH-3pA_Binn38Tu4ik3RwlayFQM6fpmExas9J6mr26v5UBnY3QFLgwrTG7w1tST_Xdk-IGlDSdc7G1KFJHKZVVSPhvnapRp-cAFSnwDjgPlhqbwOWrV/s1464/LemonCyanotypeSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Wet cyanotype with lemon slices" border="0" data-original-height="1464" data-original-width="1464" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwFzRlmmK3F9NMcwEaqYhk9xfslgRSchTB5ObIqljS5i_OiEJiBN7bLRlS7UX9JIuH4ncPbaR9UhH-3pA_Binn38Tu4ik3RwlayFQM6fpmExas9J6mr26v5UBnY3QFLgwrTG7w1tST_Xdk-IGlDSdc7G1KFJHKZVVSPhvnapRp-cAFSnwDjgPlhqbwOWrV/w640-h640/LemonCyanotypeSq.jpg" title="Wet cyanotype with lemon slices" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In <a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1497353838/abstract-wet-cyanotype-with-lemon-slices?click_key=60d341392a8e2bab1efb75aeba78b7f9882c46dc%3A1497353838&click_sum=a5f72c52&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_5&sts=1">this wet cyanotype </a>the lemon slices are acting as both the translucent object to be imaged and a source of water and acid which affects the photochemistry. By Ele Willoughby, 2023, on watercolour paper 11" x 14"<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />I have been experimenting with cyanotypes. A cyanotype is an early photographic method, first used in 1842, which
produces a cyan blue print used today for monochromatic art or
blueprints. It is made using a slow-reacting, photographic printing
formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet and blue light
spectrum, the range 300nm to 400nm known as UVA radiation. Two chemicals
are mixed: potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate, and
coated on a surface. I usually use watercolour paper and then
water to develop and fix the image. Along with some straightforward botanical images, I have objects with interesting silhouettes like lace, notions and tools. I have also been combining these with images of my own linocuts on acetate. I have been experimenting with wet cyanotype, where you begin the developing right away by applying some water while exposing the surface, as well as messing with the chemistry with things like vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and spices. I have also tried adding things which themselves are light sensitive, like lilac dye, paprika and curry powder. The results always somewhat to completely unpredictable, especially since I have been using the sun as my source of UVA radiation. This week I started toning some of my cyanotypes by bleaching with washing soda which allows tannins to bond to iron in the emulsion so images can be tinted. You can use different sources of tannins but I started with things in my kitchen: green tea and coffee. I've also embellished some with my linocut prints. Here's a taste!<br /></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1508892507/fern-cyanotype-on-watercolour-paper?click_key=d70e9f77bb4e376177602c3936aa3b4730e1d400%3A1508892507&click_sum=cdb46163&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_10&sts=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Cyanotype fern by Ele Willoughby" border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1379" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggxsZ6SQOpaUU1sSi8VGLpcV2-JuzFnuaKnhgp51H8etr2Xmn7ES2EpvheCwdeocMoLTlhAl2Q81RHsT7o9D9INj_mMLwuvgfeMFmlZBM3ZaK5fd9siz6JB65o-GHRj1kqL9bSejj0McY_LcodNeZX9u1QBcA4SQwxw--y31bwK0A2jqD3uLk1uobGq5vP/w320-h320/CyanotypeFernSq.jpg" title="Cyanotype fern by Ele Willoughby" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1508892507/fern-cyanotype-on-watercolour-paper?click_key=d70e9f77bb4e376177602c3936aa3b4730e1d400%3A1508892507&click_sum=cdb46163&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_10&sts=1">Cyanotype fern</a>, 9" x 12", <a href="Cyanotype spots by Ele Willoughby">Cyanotype spots by Ele Willoughby</a>Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1494699306/cyanotype-spots-with-plants-on?click_key=a77727963ea3b606f13dcacb41f67a2e31b236c5%3A1494699306&click_sum=b10b30eb&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_11&sts=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2181" data-original-width="2181" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq0rx3Wd0atbbj0j8SDUmGqDEz9IhNIEDCsX2kqaPwkVuGhkGhBdD2ztQjG8CwluIOF7MPG9RxzPBn0F86nemkntgM7OspCXdUw_-R8rx4qeHsdrx0bSiHQiQZ5b3K-MaOXIJt7s0I4ylTxjltfrU2XtECoHyOPJuj-U7dSbckJQjv3h5PPkLUJJWe0uJx/s320/CyanotypeSpotsSq.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1494699306/cyanotype-spots-with-plants-on?click_key=a77727963ea3b606f13dcacb41f67a2e31b236c5%3A1494699306&click_sum=b10b30eb&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_11&sts=1">Cyanotype in spots</a>, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1509564865/tea-time-cyanotype-plants-and-lace?click_key=68d380e3602d1af430dfe365595f57159aafd09f%3A1509564865&click_sum=2d636635&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_6&sts=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2617" data-original-width="2041" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvdOqAtqszIPtFuUmRtGdjtMHpqbrAaZGHT6z7NBoHuVbE79arc_hbdw-Im7bNnttXRqnolScZa9-a7zrb1BP4cFRdF2F5PpxvaJczZdaUatZsKFIr09hNAarvg0H72-Y-kIWuzfmHa58qnVw8Z0VrCC_zinyeyBWrwZUWFKhIT6KapWqYx-QtsQGgFPmQ/s320/CyanotypeTea.jpg" width="250" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1509564865/tea-time-cyanotype-plants-and-lace?click_key=68d380e3602d1af430dfe365595f57159aafd09f%3A1509564865&click_sum=2d636635&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_6&sts=1">Cyanotype with teacup pattern lace, wild geraniums and lemon balm</a>, toned with green team 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1494857304/cyanotype-of-my-linocut-octopus-with?click_key=e23160d9cdc32d0f343b4310b919c10de3fb19aa%3A1494857304&click_sum=4bb4556b&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_8&sts=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1178" data-original-width="1178" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVXaoZD16lgsET75Vbg5bNq_OiKf4RlrDVfh53ZKmMkLlU5IyxX6tB0F83Ed0-KOYjNfhlA9KuDufd7TFg0TSPqFoHSpfRu-TadgKBXOFBvPNXF6MOyZRQ0VqJfTYy7RegurOrHk6gXCxVB0NKd158Ettg3bXUoMQOmuIC-DopDwHXSeB_Wqf1dyX9QQ1t/s320/OctopusCyanotypeCedarSq.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1494857304/cyanotype-of-my-linocut-octopus-with?click_key=e23160d9cdc32d0f343b4310b919c10de3fb19aa%3A1494857304&click_sum=4bb4556b&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_8&sts=1">Octopus cyanotype</a>, toned with green tea, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1498025686/flowers-moths-in-oval-cyanotype-with?click_key=be8189f401c52e67ff915134b9862d967b4b200f%3A1498025686&click_sum=41508a8b&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_3&sts=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3245" data-original-width="2544" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5GPEkLKcqrHjl-EnDUOREHXFaT1SAXLDVSEgplhM3zjeBxmUr59VN-Esza1_h6TFfgtmavDz1W3_AZxPTOmqT9Mr6HSLiFf8zv5cm9tFzQU1KiEXNOYijMl-Jr2AkBKX7enAj1cF5XtnqY9UqxmzMXYYF6-gYfsRFD_t2GqhVeoTF3wtVyyrdzfU_eRlg/s320/OvalCyanotypeMoh.jpeg" width="251" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1498025686/flowers-moths-in-oval-cyanotype-with?click_key=be8189f401c52e67ff915134b9862d967b4b200f%3A1498025686&click_sum=41508a8b&ga_search_query=cyanotype&ref=shop_items_search_3&sts=1">Wildflowers and grasses cyanotype with linocut moths, 8" x 10.25", by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-5641268444630659222023-06-28T13:02:00.003-04:002023-06-28T13:43:43.914-04:00Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, Chemist and Scientific Illustrator<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhipZcJil5gKKc1m5Mx_zEaq6mT6AC0ymFHpCDGOBrFpodX9XnCTPCkbutToMqupnJ1ASwXxtKEGe6Tkrr6dJlKkrut0nRWyiA40lc_apSA5u5ZdLcWMEZyeonzE5cKCGRJdWvhnMGk9Ko97Rqxi9BsEA-SlLBoFUMFxhxeh1PKVtFzfo84WteQXbhcJHk4/s1018/PaulzeLavoisierSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Linocut portrait of Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1018" data-original-width="1018" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhipZcJil5gKKc1m5Mx_zEaq6mT6AC0ymFHpCDGOBrFpodX9XnCTPCkbutToMqupnJ1ASwXxtKEGe6Tkrr6dJlKkrut0nRWyiA40lc_apSA5u5ZdLcWMEZyeonzE5cKCGRJdWvhnMGk9Ko97Rqxi9BsEA-SlLBoFUMFxhxeh1PKVtFzfo84WteQXbhcJHk4/w640-h640/PaulzeLavoisierSq.jpg" title="Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1499274509/marie-anne-paulze-lavoisier-chemistry?click_key=b0d128efdbc81676a961e2f56f1697bc5433ece6%3A1499274509&click_sum=a7340e76&ga_search_query=Lavoisier&ref=shop_items_search_2&sts=1">Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier</a>, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>I have been revisiting my entire collection of women in science prints and realized that only <a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/571164948/antoine-laurent-lavoisier-and-marie-anne?click_key=4427f43c6522d7895c1462dbc9b816a003049d3f%3A571164948&click_sum=a8305bdb&ga_search_query=Lavoisier&ref=shop_items_search_1&sts=1">Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (20 January 1758 – 10 February 1836) appeared with her husband Antoine Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794)</a>, rather than on her own. I made a double-portrait of the Lavoisiers for an art show about Tarot, where I depicted "The Lovers" card. So, I decided she warranted <a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1499274509/marie-anne-paulze-lavoisier-chemistry?click_key=b0d128efdbc81676a961e2f56f1697bc5433ece6%3A1499274509&click_sum=a7340e76&ga_search_query=Lavoisier&ref=shop_items_search_2&sts=1">a single portrait too</a>, as she was a woman in STEM on her own merits. I based her appearance on David's portrait.<br /><br />The Lavoisiers, working closely together,
modernized and quantified chemistry and the scientific method,
recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen, explained the role that oxygen
plays in combustion, helped modernize chemical nomenclature and
discovered that mass is conserved in chemical reactions. Traditionally
Antoine has been called the "father of modern chemistry" (with little to
no mention of his wife) though more modern scholarship points out that
Paulze translated all his contemporaries' works from English and Latin
to French (complete with footnotes pointing out errors in chemistry),
took notes of all observations, illustrated all experimental set-ups,
edited his reports and worked so closely with him we can't easily
separate their roles. She was one of the supposed missing women in science and the history of science hiding in plain sight! They commissioned their friend, the famous painter Jacques Louis David to give her lessons in illustration. She clearly illustrated herself in her illustrations of chemical experiments. David also places her front and centre, next to Antoine and their glassware for chemistry experiments, expressing how they worked in concert in his famous portrait of the two. Attributing everything to him alone is clearly not
the full picture. She fought to defend his legacy after he was executed
during the French Revolution, and kept his name for the rest of her
life, even during her short-lived second marriage to physicist Benjamin
Thomson, Count Rumford. (She dumped Rumford as soon as she realized that
he did not intend for her to work alongside him in the lab.) <br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWbju6aC9fagTHx_cFc5dZV76BSFFezQyQcchQSES0YFDBnxGTTWXaoILaA0CZuSWp66mS_swh5n9unL8Xw2wDdkWfSTKuLg1C2qikmGbk77HqeV_GgoM-oIFsA7MGyghNMpKMQERJeauBRhj-xSNWXKrfyTgoAyTHMAn7KXRafShPq1GnG5R307-IlLHp/s625/Lavoisier-humanexp2.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Illustration by Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier" border="0" data-original-height="362" data-original-width="625" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWbju6aC9fagTHx_cFc5dZV76BSFFezQyQcchQSES0YFDBnxGTTWXaoILaA0CZuSWp66mS_swh5n9unL8Xw2wDdkWfSTKuLg1C2qikmGbk77HqeV_GgoM-oIFsA7MGyghNMpKMQERJeauBRhj-xSNWXKrfyTgoAyTHMAn7KXRafShPq1GnG5R307-IlLHp/w640-h370/Lavoisier-humanexp2.PNG" title="Illustration by Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier's many illustrations of the chemistry experiments performed in their home laboratory. This was an experiment about respiration and she is seated at her own table, taking data and illustrating what is occurring.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br />You
can also find my portrait of the two <a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/571164948/antoine-laurent-lavoisier-and-marie-anne?click_key=4427f43c6522d7895c1462dbc9b816a003049d3f%3A571164948&click_sum=a8305bdb&ga_search_query=Lavoisier&ref=shop_items_search_1&sts=1">Lavoisiers together here</a> and read more about <a href="http://minouette.blogspot.com/2018/01/antoine-laurent-and-marie-anne-paulze.html">my previous print here</a>.<br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI0CrAXm10xp4uTsoPkwX7e7pVDgTY92qiLQwcZ3X6bciv4zXV_hCweVswpaoa3ENYuTaxPQ9v6hjDkSktZcxbtG8Czz9ygLkjxVvyfA1eG85LIe4sdJzV9Ppw2DEIGdFVC_BdZ8ogrUAp5yk0n2awbymeYvXIcGQEJFNC-1KVXwEf1dHyuFjPcmxZBVvI/s1365/1024px-David_-_Portrait_of_Monsieur_Lavoisier_and_His_Wife.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Portrait of M. and Mme Lavoisier by Jacques-Louis David, 1788 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan, New York City)" border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="1024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI0CrAXm10xp4uTsoPkwX7e7pVDgTY92qiLQwcZ3X6bciv4zXV_hCweVswpaoa3ENYuTaxPQ9v6hjDkSktZcxbtG8Czz9ygLkjxVvyfA1eG85LIe4sdJzV9Ppw2DEIGdFVC_BdZ8ogrUAp5yk0n2awbymeYvXIcGQEJFNC-1KVXwEf1dHyuFjPcmxZBVvI/w480-h640/1024px-David_-_Portrait_of_Monsieur_Lavoisier_and_His_Wife.jpg" title="Portrait of M. and Mme Lavoisier by Jacques-Louis David, 1788 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan, New York City)" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_M._and_Mme_Lavoisier" title="Portrait of M. and Mme Lavoisier">Portrait of M. and Mme Lavoisier</a></i> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Louis_David" title="Jacques-Louis David">Jacques-Louis David</a>, 1788 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art" title="Metropolitan Museum of Art">Metropolitan Museum of Art</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan" title="Manhattan">Manhattan</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City" title="New York City">New York City</a>)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-30252212340259311772023-04-28T20:08:00.005-04:002023-04-28T20:11:17.381-04:00Some May Day Folk Traditions in Print<p>I've always been fascinated with May Day traditions, as a May Day baby myself. There are what have been called the "Green Root" (pagan) and "Red Root" (labour) traditions celebrated on the first of May. I've been participating in #FolkloreSunday on Twitter, learning more folklore and using my own artwork to illustrate my own posts. This year seemed like the one to illustrate some of the many "Green Root" traditions of May Day and May Eve like Beltane and Walpurgisnacht.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhntD5fGup_7d3Ub1uHjl5wABYvt9-Gt21dSRxh72qoLMgvkhTicE0Wl1dDqj_jrB6a07b1Fcd5AjtuihEp11TsCpSxCPZn7vQcczS08xYCXn5CZ5mS7TQP3-5GV8zWawRBSETOnOBik-NWsfPms7tS94giOO5R-2nwJRxS80aqqB9X4Nbt3-enJUm1tg/s1380/JackInTheGreenSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1380" data-original-width="1380" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhntD5fGup_7d3Ub1uHjl5wABYvt9-Gt21dSRxh72qoLMgvkhTicE0Wl1dDqj_jrB6a07b1Fcd5AjtuihEp11TsCpSxCPZn7vQcczS08xYCXn5CZ5mS7TQP3-5GV8zWawRBSETOnOBik-NWsfPms7tS94giOO5R-2nwJRxS80aqqB9X4Nbt3-enJUm1tg/s320/JackInTheGreenSq.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1455487792/jack-in-the-green-lino-block-print-may?click_key=4d733c2c78f53a37e16da77cc7a5e7eb469a3778%3A1455487792&click_sum=28da65c3&ref=shop_home_feat_1&sts=1">Jack-in-the-green</a>, linocut, 8" x 10" by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />When I participated in #FolkloreWeek last fall, one of the prompts was "tree" and this was the first time I learned about the Jack-Of-The-Green (or Jack O' the Green). I loved the mysterious yet absurd images of walking and dancing men covered in conical wooden or wicker frames covered in foliage, sometimes with a crown of flowers, like a wayward dancing bush leading a procession of characters like the Lord and Lady and a jester, rollicking through the streets. Jack-in-the-green has been part of May Day processions in England since the 1770s. There's a lot of debate about where the tradition came from. Some suspect it arose out of the garlands and floral wreathes worn by milkmaids on May Day, enlarged by the Chimney Sweep guilds (as they celebrated Chimney Sweeper's Day the same day). Others tie it to similar wild men foliage folk figures in continental Europe, pre-Christian fertility figures and the concept of the Green Man. More recent scholarship disputes this connection with the Green Man - but while perhaps not historical the revived 20th century version of the tradition connects the concepts. (You can find more <a href="https://thecompanyofthegreenman.wordpress.com/jack-in-the-green/">here</a> and <a href="https://windling.typepad.com/blog/2013/05/wild-folklore.html">here</a>). I have made a Jack-in-the-Green linocut. <p></p><p> </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyG_uN6Ff8HMzA0GLcrFGXhMsX5Dd6WHEcUzI6-ewW1GKysTId7QuVClhYzMkXI5yGKgH7PWI7tVC__q1S1dUF0SpeDDSwcX7sLiKRnn6bbTH_xYZkkCv4F-PTWKs0DLfZpe_7HPOgrpzo-ygEEgQ1mO6Cbooc26FbaUPTrl8zxsoUzkSsx0HAYp0nxg/s1504/BonfireSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1504" data-original-width="1504" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyG_uN6Ff8HMzA0GLcrFGXhMsX5Dd6WHEcUzI6-ewW1GKysTId7QuVClhYzMkXI5yGKgH7PWI7tVC__q1S1dUF0SpeDDSwcX7sLiKRnn6bbTH_xYZkkCv4F-PTWKs0DLfZpe_7HPOgrpzo-ygEEgQ1mO6Cbooc26FbaUPTrl8zxsoUzkSsx0HAYp0nxg/s320/BonfireSq.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1471259703/bonfire-monoprint-one-of-a-kind-original?click_key=2a87b9547648500ff51ead8d713caab8918580f5%3A1471259703&click_sum=c35fe663&ref=shop_home_active_2&sts=1">Bonfire</a>, monoprint, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby. Hand painted onto a gel plate and printed on water colour paper.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>Beltane ("lucky fire") is the Gaelic May Day festival held on 1 May, or about midway between the spring equinox and summer solstice (in the Northern hemisphere) has traditionally marked the start of summer. It's tied with mythology and was viewed as a time when fairies were strong and offerings were needed to appease the <i>aos sí</i>. It was one of the most important festivals and there are many traditions. I decided to just illustrate one: the lighting of bonfires. People and livestock often had to move through the smoke, or jump over fires or walk between two fires to guard against sickness and witchcraft. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm74TYv9rzA49cm_YeMAbcVv-L8auPWNAXwrmoDma5VIyazci-jeHwQgcqflmNVaKvvLEsCPtv5bIBSg40j33XFikshN5y3q4ycRU8M_faU3FYNvj42-oBFYziRsjGDmH6s9KoehuBtlpa2Mrv7vaWGsAG4HOQYDDKnpBf1BtcN4ddzK1C0tSlvjn4ug/s1095/WalpurgisnachtSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1095" data-original-width="1095" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm74TYv9rzA49cm_YeMAbcVv-L8auPWNAXwrmoDma5VIyazci-jeHwQgcqflmNVaKvvLEsCPtv5bIBSg40j33XFikshN5y3q4ycRU8M_faU3FYNvj42-oBFYziRsjGDmH6s9KoehuBtlpa2Mrv7vaWGsAG4HOQYDDKnpBf1BtcN4ddzK1C0tSlvjn4ug/s320/WalpurgisnachtSq.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1457077068/walpurgisnacht-bonfire-monoprint-one-of?click_key=f37a0ed8bc516db58b86c09f826a598c9dffc9ea%3A1457077068&click_sum=938f9aaa&ref=shop_home_active_1&sts=1">Walpurgisnacht</a>, monoprint by Ele Willoughby, 7.75" x 9.875", 2023. Hand painted onto a gel plate and printed on water colour paper.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Bonfires and protection against witchcraft brings us to a May Eve tradition: Walpurgisnacht and Hexennacht (Walpurgis night and Witches' Night as celebrated in Germany). May Eve is the feast day of Saint Walpurga in celebration of her canonization May 1, 870. But folklorists tie it to a more ancient celebration of a moon festival for Walpurga, another name for the Norse goddess Freya of love and beauty who also represented women's magic, sexuality, and independence as well as war and death in battle. She had a magical cloak of falcon feathers and gold necklace, trusty sacred boar friend and a chariot pulled by two cats (cats!). The May Pole can likewise be linked to Yggdrasil, the world tree. Saint Walpurga, amongst other things, apparent fought off witches, so in various European countries, people continue to light bonfires on Saint Walpurga's Eve in order to ward off evil spirits and witches. But in some places people celebrate "Witches' Night", when revelers dress as witches and
demons, set off fireworks, dance and play loud music, to
drive the witches and winter spirits away. In the Harz mountains the tradition goes back over 1,000 years ago, when people celebrated the arrival of spring making offerings to the god Wodan (or the Norse god Odin).</p><p>These are but a few of the many traditions of this time.<br /></p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-82312830057278207892023-03-29T13:36:00.000-04:002023-03-29T13:36:38.236-04:00Love and Butterflies: Victorian Lepidopterist, Scientific Illustrator and Diarist<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGMe-vJMPsXYRymClqbAji4zTiqsIL82BmzDFFiMKX6EGg3OgCyoC6hcdj-1gedfwF9Yv9phrO-z-BpFrIBVAsjM2GfF-CqZgMzL4N5i92FUrAXN6ww7zUN46l8ypK8KNH3l68qtZulgCvdGzuT1xNijCRWv_DOxTsiNTIpGknPvuQVlAlkkRiN5EEoA/s1598/MargaretFountaineSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Margaret Fountaine linocut, 11" x14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1598" data-original-width="1598" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGMe-vJMPsXYRymClqbAji4zTiqsIL82BmzDFFiMKX6EGg3OgCyoC6hcdj-1gedfwF9Yv9phrO-z-BpFrIBVAsjM2GfF-CqZgMzL4N5i92FUrAXN6ww7zUN46l8ypK8KNH3l68qtZulgCvdGzuT1xNijCRWv_DOxTsiNTIpGknPvuQVlAlkkRiN5EEoA/w640-h640/MargaretFountaineSq.jpg" title="Margaret Fountaine linocut, 11" x14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1421349950/lino-block-print-portrait-of-victorian?click_key=ad2419274f0da03c109f5c40c0bf68a61bcff6b9%3A1421349950&click_sum=a5309d64&ref=shop_home_active_1">Margaret Fountaine linocu</a>t, 11" x14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine (1862-1940)'s posthumous books featured the somewhat salacious bits of her diaries of her "wild and fearless life," but she was a also trailblazing Victorian lepidopterist, who published in many papers in The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variations, and was an expert on tropical butterflies, discovering, documenting, breeding and gathering specimen in 60 countries on 6 continents, a talented scientific illustrator, who gathered a collection of 22,000 (bequeathed to the Norwich Castle Museum). She became the only female fellow in the Royal Entomological Society in 1898. She gave scientific lectures internationality on things like "the sagacity of caterpillars." She was the most famous woman lepidopterist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.</p><p><br /></p><p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: -webkit-standard; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; orphans: auto; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh72VeTxOG0GX_Njke3hc64zbh8Gjg6dZ61JxJg9jZO1VPEyEVfP3ZFdRZLOw5voD68ORsxRdqZbOntCiDjpOyfRoh4qZfq16-ANfxgBplGB7TAZMK7nD4ZboFh-z0GG0Ol-vySw2n7Av6rCNmk_noNcr2680MIr69aq-P2qEVu6TerUNK52EVlMbOrFQ" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Margaret Fountaine" data-original-height="1110" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh72VeTxOG0GX_Njke3hc64zbh8Gjg6dZ61JxJg9jZO1VPEyEVfP3ZFdRZLOw5voD68ORsxRdqZbOntCiDjpOyfRoh4qZfq16-ANfxgBplGB7TAZMK7nD4ZboFh-z0GG0Ol-vySw2n7Av6rCNmk_noNcr2680MIr69aq-P2qEVu6TerUNK52EVlMbOrFQ=w295-h320" style="cursor: move;" title="Margaret Fountaine" width="295" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Margaret Fountaine wore many hats </td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />The eldest daughter of seven children born to a family of modest means of clergyman John Fountaine <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgLM_P9-FOtRUKq_rs9eFx2WX4SmiiiMnMhVu3ioYkd9c1Uhz_TwZiwZWZ1qdrXYiro2eBej3Mid4NEQZORkIaxhgmCIjgw5fzc9FMbv2GObkmzFJWhFHYadmkpWidBl16qH_9c2ENqUerb8X6lphCfho6RoI6WX_2Q4L7TFrqrsB8VP-nDkbH1W_CmmQ" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="463" data-original-width="318" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgLM_P9-FOtRUKq_rs9eFx2WX4SmiiiMnMhVu3ioYkd9c1Uhz_TwZiwZWZ1qdrXYiro2eBej3Mid4NEQZORkIaxhgmCIjgw5fzc9FMbv2GObkmzFJWhFHYadmkpWidBl16qH_9c2ENqUerb8X6lphCfho6RoI6WX_2Q4L7TFrqrsB8VP-nDkbH1W_CmmQ" width="165" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Septimus Hewson, <br />swindler & object of her affection</td></tr></tbody></table><br />and his wife (also a clergyman's daughter) Mary Isabella Lee, Margaret was born in Norwich. The family moved to Eaton Grange, Norwich, when her father died. The next year, at 15, Margaret began keeping a diary, a habit she kept up until her death in 1940. Teenage Margaret spent her time in nature, or gossiping with siblings about her crushes. She had already developed her interest in natural history, and her habit of falling for men she saw but didn't know... and recording her anguished feelings in her diary. She spent seven years yearning after an Irish chorister, Septimus Hewson, at her local church, pretending she was painting interior scenes of the church as an excuse to essentially stalk him. She wrote angrily in her diary if she spotted him talking to other women, though she herself had never dared speak to him. Sadly for Margaret, Septimus was a drunk and a swindler who thrown out of Norwich in disgrace. So Margaret claimed she was visiting some respectable ladies in Dublin, but snuck away to follow Septimus to Limerick and profess her love. He apparently reciprocated and she considered herself engaged. She returned home and wrote to him of her joy that her years secretly pinning after him would end with their marriage. After weeks of silence his own relatives wrote to her that she would be best to forget him; he had betrayed everyone he knew and squandered all his money on booze. She found herself nearing 30, a spinster by Victorian standards, with no prospects and no plan. But the death of a wealthy uncle when she was 27 had giving her and her sister the freedom to make choices that few of her contemporaries could enjoy. <p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgsJkNlU5ta7D03QTS8wG2_EtfIO0qPMa2fhTHn8hgXfWVwVRDYGe_VySBTyOMLSiNGta9jWIumVuAUP20se1Vd1IxOMUZhYm-hp8223y8ikLj_rkDv4ejEwIJTZr7gWcSBMhVb7u1MuQ7o1IS0CewYCPCuX33mGnZnmN28nrBbmk5II6SFTFNj5yZtcw" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Margaret Fountaine with bike" data-original-height="1390" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgsJkNlU5ta7D03QTS8wG2_EtfIO0qPMa2fhTHn8hgXfWVwVRDYGe_VySBTyOMLSiNGta9jWIumVuAUP20se1Vd1IxOMUZhYm-hp8223y8ikLj_rkDv4ejEwIJTZr7gWcSBMhVb7u1MuQ7o1IS0CewYCPCuX33mGnZnmN28nrBbmk5II6SFTFNj5yZtcw=w231-h320" title="Margaret Fountaine with bike" width="231" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Margaret Fountaine <br />with bicycle and fabulous hat </td></tr></tbody></table><p>Her first move was to leave, and escape her painful memories of unrequited love. So she headed to the continent with her sister, touring France and Switzerland by bicycle, where she found a way to dull her pain by encouraging a series of men's affections and then scorning them She wrote, "it was the pleasure of inflicting that pain that my soul was craving for. I could do it - I had the power. I had learnt it now at last." She became more serious in her butterfly collecting, using Latin rather than common names. She settled in Milan, encouraged by a teacher who told her she could have a career in opera. The workload, training, lifestyle and uncertainty of success were not for her but she kept up her studies until 1895 when she met Henry John Elwes, Fellow of the Royal Society, vice-president of the Horticultural Society and a passionate butterfly collector, at his UK estate. Butterfly collecting was not uncommon for Victorian ladies, but Margaret did not do things by half-measures. Margaret realized this could be her life's purpose. Unlike hobbyists Margaret sought out not just to gather, but to document and breed species and to travel anywhere, no matter how inhospitable, to do so, tracking elusive species through European mountains, African deserts, South American jungles, Indian plains, Australia and islands of the South Pacific. </p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiw3sqCpoiK0tZH_fZwhTqv_HEi3Gu9aWZjRG7Dn0vyrpopnfcapVcphAvaJ3_1x6Try-RNgStC33EJdNQwGkcWFcGtUquFCVxmbltI_MRmNhSiweAzv4CeITKPGYMMQ_l3tVa4BZe3rMVpTZmVwA2iIQ0qDzBFJ8vBdT-9XOv9YTLWfXRIAhKTJVxnlg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1838" data-original-width="1389" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiw3sqCpoiK0tZH_fZwhTqv_HEi3Gu9aWZjRG7Dn0vyrpopnfcapVcphAvaJ3_1x6Try-RNgStC33EJdNQwGkcWFcGtUquFCVxmbltI_MRmNhSiweAzv4CeITKPGYMMQ_l3tVa4BZe3rMVpTZmVwA2iIQ0qDzBFJ8vBdT-9XOv9YTLWfXRIAhKTJVxnlg" width="181" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Margaret and Kalil, around 1912</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>Much of this work, for better or worse, was done in partnership with a dragoman (a sort of local fixer/interpreter and guide) Khalil Neimy, 15 years her junior, which <br />we know because she noted his help (when many peers did not bother) whom she met in Damascus. Though secretly married, he declared his love for her, and they spent many years of a tumultuous relationship together, travelling the world and collecting butterflies, and, in while South America, she developed means of rearing butterflies. She shared her knowledge freely with fellow collectors and entomologists, and though not dedicated to writing up her scientific results, her reputation was such that she was invited to join the prestigious Linnean Society in 1912. </p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4DaVar3yMwvXUL95Waq2FyTFO8YHnnQ97Gpn3Eyu4TWmW2NWivXZj6sNoLrs_WLYTzqcdyyHVVEdgmGs4O8suDImqExq5-9XhMZUdpeaDDK_CQZUVWmvhteBLH0OlEgTdrDSHUK6dQFULxE6Z-sOtiPHPIYmjaIqJ1-t8qszENcTPmbwhvZiCfdGPvw" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1020" data-original-width="1020" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4DaVar3yMwvXUL95Waq2FyTFO8YHnnQ97Gpn3Eyu4TWmW2NWivXZj6sNoLrs_WLYTzqcdyyHVVEdgmGs4O8suDImqExq5-9XhMZUdpeaDDK_CQZUVWmvhteBLH0OlEgTdrDSHUK6dQFULxE6Z-sOtiPHPIYmjaIqJ1-t8qszENcTPmbwhvZiCfdGPvw" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Margaret with her butterfly net</td></tr></tbody></table>WWI hit her income as her investments plummeted in value, and for the first time she needed to earn money. She worked first as a simple cataloguer for a private collection in California and then, with her reputation for being able to find species no one else could, she started to receive collection commissions. This allowed her to continue to finance her travels and expeditions. Neimy confessed he was secretly married and was slow to get a divorce so they could marry. Also, as an Ottoman citizen, if they did marry, she would automatically become an Ottoman citizen, which she did not want. He struggled to get UK citizenship, seemingly forgetting that he also had US citizenship. But he died in 1928, and then Margaret discovered she was still seeing his wife, and fathering children while pursuing her. His loss, along with her sister's death and other family woes left her with less enjoyment of her life. But, she began to receive professional recognition and find herself the star of entomological gatherings, as she continued her fieldwork into her seventies. She died butterfly net in hand in the jungle, likely of a heart attack, discovered by a local monk. </p><p><b>References</b></p><p>Dale DeBakcsy, <a href="https://womenyoushouldknow.net/butterflies-victorian-lepidopterist-margaret-fountaine/">Love and Butterflies The Adventures of Victorian Lepidopterist Margaret Fountaine</a>, Women You Should Know, January 15, 2020</p><p>David Waterhouse, <a href="https://norwichcastle.wordpress.com/2021/07/02/a-love-of-butterflies-the-fountaine-neimy-collection/">A Love of Butterflies - The Fountaine-Neimy Collection</a>, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Museum, July 2, 2021</p><p>Florien Duijsens, <a href="https://deadladiesshow.com/tag/margaret-fountaine/">Podcast # 27: Margaret Fountaine</a>, Dead Ladies Show, November 19, 2019</p><p><a href="https://www.klmagazine.co.uk/articles/margaretfountaine">The captivating life of a leading lepidopterist</a>, KL Magazine, accessed March, 2023</p><p><a href="https://norfolkwomeninhistory.com/1851-1899/margaret-fountaine/">Margaret Fountaine</a>, Norfolk Women in History, accessed March, 2023</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fountaine">Margaret Fountaine</a>, Wikipedia, accessed March, 2023</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-89747726915333276272023-02-28T14:18:00.005-05:002023-02-28T14:18:45.863-05:00Kitchen Table Mathematics and the Pentagonal Tilings of Marjorie Rice<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOzcajDJacwwSkJbEO7LdVmTxChIY4pEQayU2sEgeF51-aHpbz7FwH4QQlD_v_uE5Ywx4WI20bAf0Eug6gSnQF_hVj5151VLAFgzzq79PK0r8XXoaaL3Xx9SyYc9Zm85gGdJEei-FN_BMvI0Cznkc_hNcdw1HKNa9lKOsl4kbkkwpr5YkdW7ip9j9_TQ/s1356/MarjorieRice-Sq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Marjorie Rice's Pentagonal Tilings" border="0" data-original-height="1356" data-original-width="1356" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOzcajDJacwwSkJbEO7LdVmTxChIY4pEQayU2sEgeF51-aHpbz7FwH4QQlD_v_uE5Ywx4WI20bAf0Eug6gSnQF_hVj5151VLAFgzzq79PK0r8XXoaaL3Xx9SyYc9Zm85gGdJEei-FN_BMvI0Cznkc_hNcdw1HKNa9lKOsl4kbkkwpr5YkdW7ip9j9_TQ/w640-h640/MarjorieRice-Sq.jpg" title="Marjorie Rice's Pentagonal Tilings" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1413024426/amateur-mathematician-marjorie-rice-and?click_key=9be9e978b29017b6c62bd0724a720a4e1d4781e6%3A1413024426&click_sum=003eb32a&ref=shop_home_active_1">Marjorie Rice and her Pentagonal Tilings,</a> linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>This is a linocut print of Marjorie Rice (née Jeuck, 1923–2017) who discovered four new pentagonal tilings of the Euclidian plane. Each print is 11" x 14" and printed by hand. Each of her 4 new pentagonal tilings is shown and the design on her shirt is based on her own "Butterflies" tessellation using the Type 13 pentagon (with two right angles and two sides of the same length). I made this portrait for the "pattern" prompt of #printerSolstice.</p><p>Born 100 years ago, she grew up poor in Florida, attending a one-room school house, where she skipped two grades, but college was never an option for her. She married conscientious objector Gilbert Rice in 1945 and they moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked in a military hospital and she worked as a commercial artist. They moved to San Diego with their infant son, who did not survive infancy, but went on to have five more healthy children.</p><p>Rice had no training as a mathematician, having completed half of a correspondence art course after high school, but she was always interested in mathematics, puzzles and art. She began to follow Scientific American writer and amateur mathematician Martin Gardner's monthly column, rushing to devour the magazine before her son (who had the subscription) could get it. Gardner had reported in July, 1975, in his article, "On Tessellating the Plane with Convex Polygon Tiles," that mathematician Richard Brandon Kershner had finally completed the task of finding all the remaining convex polygons which could make tessellations to tile the plane, an open mathematical problem which had intrigued thinkers since Ancient Greece. But by the next month, one of his readers, Richard James III, had reported that he had found a new convex pentagon tiler. Rice was inspired to start her own search. </p><p>She spent her spare time discretely drawing diagrams on the kitchen table when no one was around which she hid when her husband, kids or friends stopped by. Her daughter assumed she was simply doodling, not discovering new mathematics. She succeeded in her search by February, 1976, and wrote Gardner of her new pentagon type and its variations in shape with which she could tile the plane. Lacking any math education, she had also developed her own notation system to describe shapes. Gardner forwarded Rice's letter to mathematician and tiling pattern expert Doris Schattschneider. Though she was skeptical of Marjorie's odd and unique notation system, which she likened to "hieroglyphics" Schattschneider was able to validate Rice's results. Rice did not stop there. By October she had found 58 pentagon tilings (most previously unknown) of two paired pentagons which could tile "transitively" which she categorized in 12 classes. By December she had found two more new convex pentagon tilers and 75 distinct tessellations by pentagons that were in blocks that could be seen as "double hexagons". By the following December (1977), she found her fourth convex pentagonal tiler and 103 "2-block transitive" pentagon tilings. Through the next decade she continued to find more pentagonal tiling patterns and explored aperiodic tilings and she used her discoveries to make Escher-like tessellation patterns of flowers, shells, butterflies and bees overlain on the geometric shapes (which can still be seen on her website).</p><p>Martin Gardner included Rice's discoveries in a collection of his columns 'The Mathematical Gardner', in 1988 and Doris Schattschneider’s article 'In Praise of Amateurs.' Though she was too shy to ever publish her own results or give any talks about her work, Schattschneider convinced Rice and her husband to attend her talk about Rice's work at a meeting of the Mathematical Association of America held in Los Angeles, in 1995. When she was pointed out in the audience, she received a standing ovation! In 1996, she was the subject of a documentary on CBC's 'The Nature of Things.'</p><p>The Mathematical Association of America in Washington, D.C. had one of the ceramic tiles of one of the tilings discovered installed in the foyer of the headquarters of 1999. Rice's papers and research notes are preserved at the Eugène Strens Recreational Mathematics Collection at the University of Calgary Library. <span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(26, 26, 26); color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px;">Michaël Rao, with a computer-aided mathematical proof in 2017, established that there are a total of </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(26, 26, 26); color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px;">precisely 15 families of convex pentagons, including Rice's 4. He employed her same approach: considering how corners could come together at vertices. Rice was tickled to be recognized and loved being able to discover something new, long sought after by mathematicians </span></p><p><b>Sources</b></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice">Marjorie Rice</a>, Wikipedia, accessed February, 2023</p><p>Marjorie Rice, <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/intriguingtessellations/home">Intriguing Tessellations</a>, accessed February, 2023</p><p>Natalie Wolchover, <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/marjorie-rices-secret-pentagons-20170711/">Marjorie Rice's Secret Pentagon</a>s, Quanta Magazine Abstractions Blog, July 11, 2017</p><p>Anna Weltman, <a href="https://mathmunch.org/2013/02/25/marjorie-rice-inspired-by-math-and-subways/">Marjorie Rice, Inspired by Math, and Subways</a>, Math Munch, February 25, 2013</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-10742150815945001622023-02-28T11:38:00.001-05:002023-02-28T11:38:00.213-05:00Tiny prints and Unity and Proportion<p>There's a nifty thing (and hashtag) on Instagram, started by printmaker Kat Flint (@flintkat): #tinyPrintTuesday. There's all these delightful tiny prints in my feed. I wanted to get in on it, and have decided to make tiny linocut prints of animals I have seen in my tiny backyard. I haven't set a specifically size, yet, but these are no more than 4 inches across. It's a great way to use tiny leftover bits of lino and scraps of paper. So far, I have made a cottontail rabbit, skunk and opossum.</p><br /><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8cEf4Jy33nNB_s3U10DfGGdlVGBWEcIh7l7_lMYIHENjvZ7w0XKa4ewS6pcXsqUEOpx15yNACkpPG2av39PiVdTwU6YVkvkYRRqwibkB8RAxqF3jb0tALsGnC939y1ibArNvtbJjwzY2h8FQ-KFd-O1UuI7IPSRVL02M8HHTZ35oWSn4_Ql-YZAtLMg/s1445/Skunk.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1445" data-original-width="1157" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8cEf4Jy33nNB_s3U10DfGGdlVGBWEcIh7l7_lMYIHENjvZ7w0XKa4ewS6pcXsqUEOpx15yNACkpPG2av39PiVdTwU6YVkvkYRRqwibkB8RAxqF3jb0tALsGnC939y1ibArNvtbJjwzY2h8FQ-KFd-O1UuI7IPSRVL02M8HHTZ35oWSn4_Ql-YZAtLMg/s320/Skunk.jpeg" width="256" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Skunk, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfSmZX73SQtfXix7FinoOHXOTyMi0bXooYPn1qs1wc79mJX7BuFNaf3ONPgj0ESi2KhoAmqr_FA9igCihVoaLsD1fBmgoeIgaF7f9aL285Q5hXZ90PXClJecsbcmNH7x394A7JG6FSp10ZmTinTKfDWwyCegMvyVuPXh3XexpiMfHYiMf7RqlboTWfZg/s1684/Opossom.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="910" data-original-width="1684" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfSmZX73SQtfXix7FinoOHXOTyMi0bXooYPn1qs1wc79mJX7BuFNaf3ONPgj0ESi2KhoAmqr_FA9igCihVoaLsD1fBmgoeIgaF7f9aL285Q5hXZ90PXClJecsbcmNH7x394A7JG6FSp10ZmTinTKfDWwyCegMvyVuPXh3XexpiMfHYiMf7RqlboTWfZg/s320/Opossom.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Opossum<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNb0JHR9FnJYMTixETGzlHZCJtdhT___rsLf7iD7SguuWWGgex52XoYngoE7eejVPP7apb9afJbcRi_qEmnzPN0xz0DdMOKLKS5kokD8szRz5uDLvhEdIixC8XpbvKthlOcj3-QuBTsENbSWc-pAUYsYuRnmSglm4BSt-Q4h21nv2cVHHnZqbHEN5qYg/s1174/Cottontail.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1169" data-original-width="1174" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNb0JHR9FnJYMTixETGzlHZCJtdhT___rsLf7iD7SguuWWGgex52XoYngoE7eejVPP7apb9afJbcRi_qEmnzPN0xz0DdMOKLKS5kokD8szRz5uDLvhEdIixC8XpbvKthlOcj3-QuBTsENbSWc-pAUYsYuRnmSglm4BSt-Q4h21nv2cVHHnZqbHEN5qYg/s320/Cottontail.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cottontail, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>I have also made a couple of prints for the #printerSolstice series of prompts. For Proportion, I combined my existing golden spiral lino block with my own hand print. For Unity, I had fun once again playing with the concept both literally (in mathematics, unity means 1) and figuratively (with unity of design). I built up a background of radiating colours with my gelliplate and added a linocut 1.<div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAOU6y1c_3FCzDaAO_j9Lw3O8hSLq3qAx2rYcy7mP-UmviOnmju2XGjIo4T2Vwi_6eFljEQLfLt-eRF4VYcntZXcvKT-0xcigG-w89JY1d6coiU87TIOthpaKYD0aIBeXFs0IRMJfAToF0YdJRLp8HFDIdoX37jWe1OcTZfAc-MyVmVTrKmAH1HQie0Q/s3260/Proportion.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Proportion, 9" x 12" linocut with handprint by Ele Willoughby" border="0" data-original-height="3260" data-original-width="2481" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAOU6y1c_3FCzDaAO_j9Lw3O8hSLq3qAx2rYcy7mP-UmviOnmju2XGjIo4T2Vwi_6eFljEQLfLt-eRF4VYcntZXcvKT-0xcigG-w89JY1d6coiU87TIOthpaKYD0aIBeXFs0IRMJfAToF0YdJRLp8HFDIdoX37jWe1OcTZfAc-MyVmVTrKmAH1HQie0Q/w488-h640/Proportion.jpeg" title="Proportion, 9" x 12" linocut with handprint by Ele Willoughby" width="488" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Proportion, 9" x 12" linocut and handprint by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwlmL5zIRSWrLfuF7MBEHsW0nbtZfawqG8lVJGsaGp1qsa4Rp9dJ3csZI2kjMk94HhizcNrpe14LMIfIwGlI031ck0l2jCAnfycixfYZG6sFfJ6_y7SdPRe5qsE704hqe2IosQrlv5ZyI6G61fJ0Rz6GUOjum4zSzohQk2_ofJ0nyojQlN1JFxIgrjeA/s2921/Unity.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Unity, mono print by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="2921" data-original-width="2400" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwlmL5zIRSWrLfuF7MBEHsW0nbtZfawqG8lVJGsaGp1qsa4Rp9dJ3csZI2kjMk94HhizcNrpe14LMIfIwGlI031ck0l2jCAnfycixfYZG6sFfJ6_y7SdPRe5qsE704hqe2IosQrlv5ZyI6G61fJ0Rz6GUOjum4zSzohQk2_ofJ0nyojQlN1JFxIgrjeA/w526-h640/Unity.jpeg" title="Unity, mono print by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="526" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unity, 8" x 10", linocut and gel plate print by Ele Willoughby</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-88121338806282026542023-02-23T11:21:00.000-05:002023-02-23T11:21:07.603-05:00Kathleen Lonsdale, crystallographer, pacifist and prison reformer<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi02Exy1CU06GwSDYU4osE-RefkWSpyHZxTji6izNSdIIoxWpRtwRkT_eekdR6On_pLTwDPSPY6f6TsPSSGverOeZbkK7-OuIaRd2qwn9bZ6NTegFDXXBErotcjXhrchH_K0PkZ8H_Rvy47CCTEruNM4p7bewlhsJ5IN4W8Z-zFA9kzFUJthbCYLRQ0WA/s1567/KathleenLonsdaleSq.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Kathleen Lonsdale linocut print by Ele Willoughby" border="0" data-original-height="1567" data-original-width="1567" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi02Exy1CU06GwSDYU4osE-RefkWSpyHZxTji6izNSdIIoxWpRtwRkT_eekdR6On_pLTwDPSPY6f6TsPSSGverOeZbkK7-OuIaRd2qwn9bZ6NTegFDXXBErotcjXhrchH_K0PkZ8H_Rvy47CCTEruNM4p7bewlhsJ5IN4W8Z-zFA9kzFUJthbCYLRQ0WA/w640-h640/KathleenLonsdaleSq.jpg" title="Kathleen Lonsdale linocut print by Ele Willoughby" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1399683976/lino-block-print-of-kathleen-lonsdale?click_key=e73388c98305ed14a0e5c7577e91d94a314bebc4%3A1399683976&click_sum=68207952&ref=shop_home_active_50">Kathleen Lonsdale</a>, 11" x 14" linocut print on Japanese kozo by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626;">I chose Kathleen Lonsdale DBE FRS (née Yardley, 1903-1971) for the </span><a class="x1i10hfl xjbqb8w x6umtig x1b1mbwd xaqea5y xav7gou x9f619 x1ypdohk xt0psk2 xe8uvvx xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r xexx8yu x4uap5 x18d9i69 xkhd6sd x16tdsg8 x1hl2dhg xggy1nq x1a2a7pz _aa9_ _a6hd" href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/printersolstice/" role="link" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(var(--ig-link)); cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; word-wrap: break-word;" tabindex="0">#printerSolstice</a> <span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626;">prompt shape because she solved a longstanding chemistry </span><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626;">conundrum of the shape of benzene & her drawing of electron density for hexachlorobenzene (green) & model of hexamethylbenzene explore shape in different forms. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Going to Holloway prison was the single most formative experience for Kathleen Lonsdale’s scientific career and it gave her the ability to speak to anyone. Her husband said, “Before prison it might have bothered her to go to Buckingham Palace. Afterwards, Holloway or Buckingham Palace were all the same.” Born the tenth child of a poor family in Ireland, with four brothers who died in infancy, pacifist, prison reformer and physicist Dame Kathleen Lonsdale DBE FRS (née Yardley, 1903-1971) served time, as she was unwilling to compromise her beliefs. She was also a trail blazing crystallographer who solved a conundrum which had plagued chemists for decades: the shape of the benzene ring, proving it was flat using x-ray diffraction on hexamethylbenzene in 1929. She was the first to employ Fourier spectral methods and used them to solve the structure of hexachlorobenzene in 1931. In 1945 she was one of the first two women elected Fellow of the Royal Society and was the first woman in several roles including: tenured professor at University College London, president of the International Union of Crystallography and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
Her father, a soldier and then a postmaster Harry Yardley and her mother, a strict fundamentalist Baptist of Scottish descent Jessie Cameron did not have a happy marriage. Between the unrest in Ireland and her father’s alcoholism, her mother decided to divorce and move the children to Seven Kinds, Essex, England when Kathleen was five. She won a scholarship to the Ilford County High School for Girls but had to go to the boys’ school in her final two years as the girls’ school did not offer mathematics and science. During WWI her home was on the Zeppelin route; she did homework by candlelight during air raids and first developed her opposition to war. Anxious to get to university as soon as possible she went to the Bedford College for Women in London on a county scholarship. After her first year she won a university scholarship and switched from mathematics to physics, against all advice (especially that of her old headmistress who told her she would never distinguish herself in physics). She graduated in physics with the highest score ever for a London University, with a BSc in 1922, which brought her to the attention of physics Nobel laureate William Henry Bragg, one of her examiners. <br />
<br />
Bragg offered her a spot on his team at University College (and then the Royal Institution), and a grant of a <b style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.000000953674316px;">£</b>180 a year! She lived at home and contributed to family expenses, gaining her MSc from University College London in 1924. She worked with Bragg until she married in 1927 and followed her husband, research chemist Thomas Lonsdale to Leeds, where he had been offered a job at the Silk Research Association. Shortly after her marriage, she applied for an 1851 Exhibition Fellowship which Bragg expected she would win, as several of his other (all male) students had done. Not only did they turn her down for the award, they wrote they “would be breaking the spirit of the regulations in awarding an exhibition to a married woman.” Luckily Bedford College offered her a research grant and she continued to correspond with Bragg. She worked part-time as a physics demonstrator and doing lab work in Leeds. It was here that she was given crystals of hexamethylbenzene, the first important structure she solved. Debate had been raging between organic chemists and crystallographers whether benzene was flat or had a zigzag shape like cyclohexane, but benzene itself was a challenge to crystallize. Lonsdale had the insight that she could instead look at the benzene within hexamethylbenzene and in the process of solving its form, she proved that the benzene ring (which it contained) was flat. She followed this with solving the structure of hexachlorbenzene; this was important as she was the first to investigate an organic compound with Fourier analysis. She had cleverly found a project she could do with calculations rather than lab work while she focused on starting their family. She also developed popular crystallographic reference tables with W.T. Astbury. She considered giving up science, but Thomas supported her research told her he “had not married to get a free housekeeper.” He encouraged her to continue in research. When they had their first daughter in 1929, Bragg convinced the Royal Institution to grant her <b style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.000000953674316px;">£</b>50 to employ some childcare so she could work on calculations. Then they moved back to London for Thomas’ new job, and had a second daughter in 1931. Bragg, anxious to have her back, was able to find a further <b style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.000000953674316px;">£</b>200 to assist her at home so she could return to work in 1931. They had their son in 1934. She earned her doctorate from the University of London in 1936 while working at the Royal Institution, where she stayed for 15 years. She worked with Bragg until his death in 1942, then with Sir Henry Dale, as a Dewar Fellow from 1944 through 1946.</p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
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She was raised a Baptist, but in 1935, she and her husband, both committed pacifists, became Quakers. She became a Sponsor of the UK Peace Pledge Union, which meant she signed the pledge "War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.” They turned the top floor of their house into a flat where they welcomed refugees from Germany. When she was required to register for civil defence duties during WWII she refused to do so and refused to pay the small fine for not registering. She believed there should be an exemption for conscientious objection. She was sentenced to serve a month in Holloway prison, where the grim conditions lead to a life-long commitment to prison reform. While she was imprisoned, she found the clothing unclean, medical exam sketchy and she collapsed under her workload, scrubbing and cleaning; only then did they lighten her workload. Sir Henry Dale requested that she be given access to papers and instruments and she was allowed to work in her cell in the evenings. Her colleagues worried she would be bored; she was in fact absorbed, talking to fellow prisoners about their lives and crimes. Her second fine for refusing to register for civil defence was paid anonymously, much to her chagrin; she would have rather stood on her principles and serve another prison term. She contributed to a pamphlet on Prison for Women about her experiences in Holloway and the need for prison reform.<br />
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In 1945 Lonsdale and Marjory Stephenson were the first women elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Then she finally got a permanent position. In 1946 she was appointed Reader in Crystallography and then Professor of Chemistry and Head of the Department of Crystallography at the University College London in 1949, finally beginning to teach and run her own research group, mentoring future crystallographers. She was their first tenured female professor. She researched the use of x-ray imaging at different temperatures and the structure and texture of crystals. She worked on the synthesis of diamonds. She won the Royal Society’s Davy Medal for significant discoveries in chemistry in 1957. Later she worked on solid state reactions, pharmacology and structure of methonium compounds and stones and minerals produced by the human body like kidney stones. She became an emeritus professor after 1968. Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin wrote, "There is a sense in which she appeared to own the whole of crystallography in her time.</p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br />
In 1953 she delivered the keynote Swathmore Lecture at the Yearly Meeting of British Quakers, “Removing the Causes of War”. She wrote about peaceful dialogue <span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">was appointed the first secretary of Churches' Council of Healing by the Archbishop of Canterbury. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">When Thomas retired at 60, they moved to Brexill-on-Sea; this meant 5 hours a day commute for Kathleen, but she felt it worthwhile though she was tired. Thomas helped with her tremendous amount of correspondence about peace and prison reform, and would bring her dinner in bed as soon as she got home. She was someone who never stopped working, even when she became ill and was hospitalized. She died in hospital 1971 from anaplastic cancer, at age 68, the day after Thomas' 70th birthday.<br />
<br />
<b>References</b><br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Lonsdale"><span style="color: blue;">Kathleen Lonsdale</span></a>, Wikipedia, accessed February, 2023<br />
<br />
Hodgkin, Dorothy M.C., <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsbm.1975.0014"><span style="color: blue;">Kathleen Lonsdale, 28 January 1903 - 1 April 1971</span></a>, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Volume 21, Issue 21, November 1975<br />
<br />
Melinda Baldwin, <a href="https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.4.20180125a/full/"><span style="color: blue;">The Royal Society’s first woman physicist</span></a>, Physics Today, 25 January, 2018. DOI: 10.1063/PT.6.4.20180125a <br />
<br />
<a href="https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8059695/one-crystal-model-of-hexamethyl-benzene-model"><span style="color: blue;">One crystal model of hexamethyl benzene</span></a>, Science Museum Group, Object Number: 1993-421/4/11, Gift of University College London, in memory of Dame Kathleen Lonsdale </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-7517664452836232612023-02-02T12:20:00.000-05:002023-02-02T12:20:06.833-05:00Vera Rubin and What Can't Be Seen<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhESZOATDmwm3TjyoiuL_1-Kj3y2dV9zq_hthH1ZEWwfGMs8Q9vWtV-agOopUrHwgsBQDkLPeUZz0fQ8HTmwUBWzOg7nLvunpA_NPuj846HIUpYaPEBR-T4XZ7NUg_U0ZUisB8q4z5PnZJCqoNUmKL06t9U48R3lIaDe2RXVueKUsaD0gCSzbuJYVc1sQ/s1692/VeraRubinSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Vera Rubin, linocut on Japanese paper, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1692" data-original-width="1692" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhESZOATDmwm3TjyoiuL_1-Kj3y2dV9zq_hthH1ZEWwfGMs8Q9vWtV-agOopUrHwgsBQDkLPeUZz0fQ8HTmwUBWzOg7nLvunpA_NPuj846HIUpYaPEBR-T4XZ7NUg_U0ZUisB8q4z5PnZJCqoNUmKL06t9U48R3lIaDe2RXVueKUsaD0gCSzbuJYVc1sQ/w640-h640/VeraRubinSq.jpg" title="Vera Rubin, linocut on Japanese paper, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vera Rubin, linocut on Japanese paper, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2023. The orbital velocity of galaxies is plotted against distance (on top of a galaxy, from its centre outwards). There's a wide gulf between the drop off that would be predicted by Kepler's laws and what was observed. Here, I have left that region white to emphasize that it was evidence of something missing and unseen. So I selected her for the #printerSolstice prompt space, so I could allude to outer space and have the space within the composition be what was telling the story.<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>This is a linocut print of renown astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, 1928-2016) and her discovery that the angular motion of galaxies deviates considerably from predictions, which we now know was the first evidence for dark matter, confirmed in the decades since. </p><p>Her parents, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, electrical engineer Pesach Kobchefski (anglicized to Philip Cooper) from Lithuania, and Rose Applebaum from what is now Moldova, met in Philadelphia, working at Bell Telephone; though her mother's job ended when she married. When Vera was 10 they moved to Washington, DC, where she watched stars from her window and first fell in love with astronomy. <span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">“What fascinated me was that if I opened my eyes during the night, they had all rotated around the pole and I found that inconceivable. I just was captured,” she later told AIP in 1995. </span>With her father she built a simple cardboard telescope and tracked meteors. Her older sister went to law school. After she finished high school in '44 she ignored her physics teacher's advice to pursue art rather than science and went to the women's college Vassar, where astronomy trailblazer Maria Mitchell had been a professor as early as 1865. She graduated with honours, the sole astronomy graduate of 1948.</p><p>She wanted to pursue graduate studies at Princeton but was barred due to her sex; Princeton took 27 more years to admit women astronomy graduate students. She turned down an offer from Harvard, and instead opted for Cornell where her new husband, physicist Robert Joshua Rubin was a graduate student. During her masters (Cornell, 1951) she studied the motions of 109 galaxies. Hubble flow (or the Hubble-Lemaître law) states that galaxies are moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. Rubin was one of the first to observe a deviation from this law. She studied under Philip Morrison, Hans Bethe, and Richard Feynman and worked with astronomer Martha Stahr Carpenter to find a thesis topic on galaxy dynamics. She said that Carpenter's "<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">course in galaxy dynamics really set me off on a direction that I followed almost my entire career.”</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span> Her husband brought her a paper by renown physicist and cosmologist George Gamow who pondered whether galaxies moved like solar systems and it inspired her to start investigating how galaxies move. She found a plane of higher density of galaxies, which years later we would recognize as was some of the earliest evidence of the super galactic plane, the equator of our supercluster of galaxies. </p><p>One of her advisors, Robert Shaw told her that her work was sloppy but should be presented to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting. Since she was not a member, and very pregnant, he could do that - under his own name, not hers. So, she said she could go. She found the discussion after was acrimonious and she felt like an imposter. Her paper was never published. </p><p>She took 6 months maternity leave but found it immensely difficult being at home with their lovely baby but watching her husband going to work daily to pursue what he loved. It was her husband who insisted she return to grad school. He took a job at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. She gained experience working summers at the Naval Research Laboratory and the US Naval Observatory. She was admitted to the PhD program at Georgetown University, the only university in Washington, D.C. with a graduate astronomy program, at age 23, expecting their second child. The Jesuit astronomer Fr. Francis Heyden taught his courses at night, a real challenge with a young family. She encountered sexism, and recounted how she was not allowed to meet her advisor in his office as women were barred from that area of the Catholic university. When writing her thesis, Heyden got her in contact with George Gamow, who worked at the nearby Applied Physics Laboratory and was an adjunct professor at George Washington University. Gamow took her on as a student. In her 1954 thesis she noted that galaxies clump together rather than being randomly distributed - a largely ignored idea it took the field decades to catch up with. </p><p>While her four children were very young, she taught at Georgetown and Montgomery College for several years before gaining a research position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (which operated the Wilson Observatory in California and had a new high-tech magnetically focused electronic image tube which could increase the sensitivity of telescopes). She worked for a year with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge observing rotating galaxies using the McDonald Observatory's 82" telescope<span style="color: #202122; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); font-size: 14px;">. </span></span>She was the first woman to use the Palomar Observatory in 1965, pragmatically solving the lack of washrooms by claiming one by going to her room, cutting out a little paper skirt and pasting it to the little man icon on the door. "There you go; now you have a ladies' room." At Carnegie she met physicist and astronomical instrument maker Kent Ford. Together they made the most sensitive spectrometer of the day using the magnetically focused image tube- an instrument which divided light into its constituent frequencies and importantly allowed astronomers to study small regions of galaxies previously too dim to observe, not just galaxies in their entirety. They started looking at the newly discovered quasars but she did not enjoy the competition from astronomers with more access to world-class telescopes and the race to explain these objects. She wanted to carve out a niche to themselves. They decided to look at Andromeda Galaxy, returning to her interest in galaxy dynamics with Ford's spectrometer allowing them to see if galaxies did rotate like our solar system. Since mass and hence gravity is clustered in the centre, nearer objects should go faster than objects at the periphery. But, when they looked at areas of hydrogen gas where new stars form, at various distances from the centre of the galaxy, they all seemed to be going at the same speed. The expected drop off with distance simply wasn't there. They spent years on the project, travelling to various telescopes across the country for observing time. Rubin spent long hours analyzing data on punchcards and always seeing the same thing: no drop-off with distance from the centre of Andromeda. So they looked at other galaxies, and more and more galaxies. They gathered dozens of rotation curves and they were all flat. It contradicted theory and they did not know why but their data was undeniable. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galaxy_rotation_under_the_influence_of_dark_matter.ogv">You can see a video of how galaxies were predicted to move next to how they are observed to move here</a>).</p><p>The concept of dark matter was proposed by Jan Oort (1932) and Fritz Zwicky (1933) to explain how physics seemed to imply more mass than astronomers could see, but they were largely ignored and no one has developed any theory of how galaxies who behave in the presence of dark matter, nor had anyone gathered observational evidence of dark matter. Rubin and Ford simply did not know what their observations meant. "One day I just decided that I had to understand what this complexity was that I was looking at, and I made sketches on a piece of paper, and suddenly I understood it all," Rubin said. A halo of dark matter - that is, matter which is not luminous, which we cannot see with telescopes, perhaps better imagined as invisible or unseeable rather than "dark," around galactic cores would spread out the mass throughout the galaxies, and hence and speeds would remain flat with distance from the centre. This unseen matter that Rubin and Ford first observed is now understood as the stuff that dictates how galaxies move, and even the origin and fate of our universe. </p><p>Since their discovery, a theoretical frame work was set out which fits their model and the Planck satellite measured dark matter by observing the cosmic microwave background. It imaged clumping in the early universe which otherwise would have been homogeneous but which instead, because of this dark matter, evolved into the superclusters of galaxies we know today. We now believe there is five times as much invisible dark matter and the luminous matter we can see. The discovery of dark matter revolutionized astronomy and lead to entire new subfields of astronomy and particle physics. She was a favourite to win the Nobel Prize for many years, but died before that ever happened. Twenty years after Rubin's research revealed dark matter, dark energy was discovered, and its discoverers received the Nobel in 2011. In 2019, three years after her death, James Peebles shared the Nobel Prize in physics for work on evolution of our universe- notably theoretical work on existence of dark matter and dark energy. Many physicists and astronomers lamented the egregious snub of Vera Rubin, by waiting until she had died rather than including her.</p><p>She also found evidence that some stars and gas within galaxies move counter to the prevailing motion, some of the first evidence of galaxy mergers.</p><p>Throughout her career she was a champion of women in science, writing, <span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(33, 37, 41); color: #212529; font-family: "Source Serif Pro", georgia, times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 17px;">“I live and work under three basic assumptions</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(33, 37, 41); color: #212529; font-family: "Source Serif Pro", georgia, times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 17px;">. One: There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. Two: Worldwide, half of all brains are in women. Three: We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women.” She likewise championed scientific literacy.</span></p><p><span style="color: #212529; font-family: Source Serif Pro, georgia, times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(33, 37, 41); font-size: 17px;">She published more than 100 peer reviewed scientific papers, a collection of essays, was on the editorial boards of journals and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (the second woman astronomer admitted, after Margaret Burbidge) and won the National Medal of Science. She won the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1996; she was only the second woman to do so, 168 years after Caroline Herschel. Carnegie named a post-doc fellowship in her honour and the American Astronomical Society named a Vera Rubin Early Career Prize. There is Vera Rubin Ridge on Mars and Asteroid 5726 Rubin, a satellite and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory named in her honour. All four of her children grew up to be PhD mathematicians and scientists and they credit their mother for making it look like desirable and fun. </span></span></p><p><b>References</b></p><p>Vera Rubin, Wikipedia, accessed January 2023.</p><p><a href="https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/meet-vera-rubin">Meet Vera Rubin</a>, November 17, 2021, Air And Space Museum, Smithsonian Museum.</p><p>Sarah Scoles, <a href="https://astronomy.com/news/2016/10/vera-rubin">How Vera Rubin confirmed dark matter</a>, Astronomy, Tuesday, October 4, 2016 </p><p>Matt Schudel, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/vera-rubin-astronomer-who-verified-existence-of-dark-matter-dies-at-88/2016/12/26/545e617c-cb9d-11e6-a747-d03044780a02_story.html?utm_term=.154b29c93a13">Vera Rubin, astronomer who proved existence of dark matter, dies at 88</a>, Washington Post, December 26, 2016</p><p>Rachel Feltman, <a href="https://www.popsci.com/in-memory-vera-rubin-woman-nobel-prize-forgot/">In memory of Vera Rubin, the woman the Nobel Prize forgot</a>, Popular Science, December 27, 2016</p><p>Ethan Siegal, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/08/24/who-really-discovered-dark-matter-fritz-zwicky-or-vera-rubin/?sh=2927ccf817a7">Who Really Discovered Dark Matter, Fritz Zwicky or Vera Rubin?</a> Forbes, August 24, 2021</p><p>Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos, Bold Type Books, New York, 2022.</p><p>Kelsey Johnson, We're Sorry, Vera Rubin, Scientific American, October 16, 2019</p><p>Shannon Connellan, <a href="https://mashable.com/article/nobel-prize-physics-2019">Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to scientists, some rally behind one who never got one</a>, Mashable, October 8, 2019</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-69851417421352305482023-02-01T13:20:00.001-05:002023-02-01T13:20:23.929-05:00Jack Frost, astronomers Kepler and Lepaute and bees in snail shells<p> I haven't kept up with posting all my recent prints, so today, we're playing catchup! I've been doing #printerSolstice so I have managed to make a print weekly tie to their prompts. This year the prompts are elements of art and design: value, form, line, balance, texture and upcoming are space, shape, contrast, proportion, unity, pattern and variety. I'm trying to interpret these prompts in light on my ongoing series of prints of various sorts. <b>The first one, value </b>(or the lightness and darkness of colours), I applied to another slightly sinister winter folktale: Jack Frost and made a print in tints and shades of cobalt blue.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7BZw7X-N0jgEv-MjjA5PDwJumMr7WulAVlq5NZU9XsmPDb8l67P1jNUKyKQitWIlJtMQ2U4GgvN2D0Kaz8fec1Q8T_EbHT5Xj1-XjHe33bNHL-VptiWRg4e185dIXXJsS72BGaX6zbC1SvJAesMng71AYnp675x9i44IOL-HD06eGCeHJdYOYRA0ewA/s1062/JackFrostsq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1062" data-original-width="1062" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7BZw7X-N0jgEv-MjjA5PDwJumMr7WulAVlq5NZU9XsmPDb8l67P1jNUKyKQitWIlJtMQ2U4GgvN2D0Kaz8fec1Q8T_EbHT5Xj1-XjHe33bNHL-VptiWRg4e185dIXXJsS72BGaX6zbC1SvJAesMng71AYnp675x9i44IOL-HD06eGCeHJdYOYRA0ewA/s320/JackFrostsq.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack Frost, linocut on cardstock, 5" x 7" by Ele Willoughby, 2022</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><b>For form</b>, I thought of Kepler and how he arrived at his laws from thinking about music and then the Platonic Solids!</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6LFKLDOfFs8qua52xntg9sekchEFmUgIZqGfPfpJ75EqLhh5UDKzGTAXPoVhCFM6iTmhIJCeCeRuVyRpKvE19Pn8-5pR7BoV6tCPnbYjoPQVWtlHcbuBkDU-ZmFb41OpjngVP3tseCsJFCDNowlzM9CSsWvjH94HpY9ZBzd7d506NBRnHYoGDYKyGxw/s1347/KeplerSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Johannes Kepler, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1347" data-original-width="1347" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6LFKLDOfFs8qua52xntg9sekchEFmUgIZqGfPfpJ75EqLhh5UDKzGTAXPoVhCFM6iTmhIJCeCeRuVyRpKvE19Pn8-5pR7BoV6tCPnbYjoPQVWtlHcbuBkDU-ZmFb41OpjngVP3tseCsJFCDNowlzM9CSsWvjH94HpY9ZBzd7d506NBRnHYoGDYKyGxw/w640-h640/KeplerSq.jpg" title="Johannes Kepler, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1390420959/johannes-kepler-lino-block-print-with?click_key=0e1b71c2698750cce15a9e6f133bbf13676f62c2%3A1390420959&click_sum=4e72f51f&ga_search_query=Kepler&ref=shop_items_search_1">Johannes Kepler</a>, linocut, 11" x 14" on Japanese kozo paper, by Ele Willoughby 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>This is my linocut of mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). We remember him for his role in the Scientific Revolution, and his three laws of planetary motion in particular. His laws modified Copernicus’ heliocentric model; he replaced the circular orbits with elliptical ones & described velocities of planets. Today we know them as:</p><p>1) Planetary orbits are ellipses with the Sun as one of the foci (top magenta ellipse)</p><p>2) A line from Sun to planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time periods (middle ellipse)</p><p>3) The square of the planet’s orbital period (or year) is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis (shown as the horizontal arrow in the bottom ellipse).</p><p>But, I find it fascinating- & important to note- that he came to these laws exploring mystical ideas about music, geometry and congruence with physical phenomena. Sometimes we tell simple, but misleading stories about scientific progress. </p><p>First he argued that the spacing of the 6 known planets from the Sun were related to the 5 Platonic solids, each encased in a sphere and nested one inside another. He had to order them selectively: octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron and cube. He then related the size of the spheres to the orbital periods of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). But this formula was not precise enough…. But we can see this as the seed of his 3rd law. The gold shapes are the nested Platonic solids from his <i>Mysterium Cosmographicum</i>. </p><p>He also took the medieval idea of the “music of the spheres” literally and translated planetary angular speed as measured from the Sun as musical notes and finds that the minimum and maximum speeds of neighbouring planets approximate harmonies. Though unrelated to our modern ideas about our solar system these explorations of geometry and music ultimately lead to his correct models, which in turn were a significant steps towards Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.</p><p><b>Next came line, and I made it about the line traced by an eclipse:</b></p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmEksTNlPVYJwm1H4z_zB41Oa8jBxam92mv8WVET9T32aaF_wjtrfO5ODR88NEhxtSIq6-y97PeuXmDKI9BPVLqNetsWlF5l4bCjdol5BZHwRbgDzf_uZ8wPPW06xfbV9XJaCUtER1lZWlZx_7UQM-N18pOu3d7wr9bXSAZGz_H5rjgf49AVvtpJu7aQ/s1732/NicoleReineLepauteSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Nicole-Reine Lepaute, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1732" data-original-width="1732" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmEksTNlPVYJwm1H4z_zB41Oa8jBxam92mv8WVET9T32aaF_wjtrfO5ODR88NEhxtSIq6-y97PeuXmDKI9BPVLqNetsWlF5l4bCjdol5BZHwRbgDzf_uZ8wPPW06xfbV9XJaCUtER1lZWlZx_7UQM-N18pOu3d7wr9bXSAZGz_H5rjgf49AVvtpJu7aQ/w640-h640/NicoleReineLepauteSq.jpg" title="Nicole-Reine Lepaute, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1394333451/lino-block-portrait-of-nicole-reine?click_key=3a51d45b3021df0e69672cd09da5f25e4da7a1fa%3A1394333451&click_sum=9c1b73f5&ref=shop_home_active_45">Nicole-Reine Lepaute</a>, linocut, 11" x 14" on Japanese kozo paper, by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>This is my linocut portrait of Nicole-Reine Lepaute, née Étable de la Brière, (5 January 1723 – 6 December 1788). She was a French astronomer, mathematician and human computer. My print celebrates how she calculated the path of the solar eclipse of 1764. She also worked with Alexis Clairaut and Jérôme Lalande to much more precisely calculate the date of the return of Halley’s Comet. This is no mean feat when you realize this was essentially solving the notorious three-body by hand (as the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn affect its orbit around the sun). They worked in parallel, calculating for 6 months straight, barely stopping to eat! She also produced astronomical almanacs from 1759 to 1783 and was also a member of the <i>Scientific Académie de Béziers</i>.</p><p>Some of the historic women of science whose names and achievements were recorded, are known to us because of their wealth and privilege. Though Nicole-Reine Lepaute was born in Luxembourg Palace, she was not an aristocrat; she was the sixth of nine children of the valet of the duchess de Barry and her sister. A bright child, she was self-taught and devoured all the books in the library. Her later friend and long-time collaborator, astronomer Jérôme Lalande wrote that she had "too much spirit not to be curious." </p><p>She married the royal clockmaker Jean-André Lepaute, in the Luxembourg Palace, in 1764. She became responsible for the household accounts but her marriage also allowed her to pursue her interest in mathematics and astronomy. She applied her skills to document, observe and calculate the workings of all her husband's inventions. The Académie des Sciences sent Lalande to inspect her husband's new type of pendulum clock. The three worked on the theory of clockmaking and added to her husband's "Traité d'horlogerie," which he had published in 1755. Though she was not included as a co-author, Lalande was nothing but praise for her, writing, "Madame Lepaute computed for this book a table of numbers of oscillations for pendulums of different lengths, or the lengths for each given number of vibrations, from that of 18 lignes, that does 18000 vibrations per hour, up to that of 3000 leagues"</p><p>Though Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, published in 1687, allowed astronomers to calculate planetary orbits around the sun, to do so they considered only the two bodies: the mass and position of a single planet and the sun. The truth is more complex, because all masses exert gravity, and as soon as we introduce even a third mass there is no general closed-form solution and some systems are even chaotic. The first problem studied was the Sun-Earth-Moon 3-body problem, which Newton could not solve and succeeding generations continued to pursue. Early physicists became so frustrated that they began to doubt Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. Renown mathematician Leonard Euler even wrongly argued against the inverse square law. Being able to accurately predict the Moon's orbit had huge implications for navigation and determination of longitude at sea. Competing polymaths Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Alexis Clairaut each presented their analyses of the problem to the <i>Académie Royale des Sciences</i> in 1747. Clairaut had found a brilliant approximate solution to the 3-body problem for which he received the 1750 prize of the St Petersburg Academy for his essay "<i>Théorie de la lune</i>". </p><p>In 1757, Lalande decided he improve on the predictions of a different 3-body problem: the return of Halley's Comet, last seen in 1682. Because the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn cannot be neglected, Halley himself was only able to calculate that the comet would return "around the end of the year 1758 or the beginning of the next." He enlisted the help of Clairaut and Lepaute. The divided up the calculations required and worked in parallel for more than 6 months, barely even stopping to eat! They were in a race to make their prediction before the comet itself arrived. By November 1758 they gave a two-month window for comet's perihelion (closed point to the sun) of the 15th of March to the 15th of May, centered around the 13th of April 1759. They missed the comet's arrival, the 13th of March, 1759 by only a couple of days. Sour grapes Jean d'Alembert griped that their work was "more laborious than deep". In fact, their heroic efforts were a huge technical feat and ten-fold improvement on Haley's vague two-year window. Their error was only due to employing the less-than-accurate accepted masses for Jupiter and Saturn. Notorious ladies' man Clairaut unfortunately removed any mention of Lepaute from his 1760, "<i>Théorie du mouvement des comètes</i>", alledgedly to please another woman, whereas in Lalande's "<i>Théorie des Comètes</i>" he insists they could never have made the calculations without her. </p><p>Lepaute went on to collaborate with Lalande and his calculations for decades. In 1759 Lalande became the director of the Académie des Sciences astronomical almanac Connaissance des Temps (Knowledge of the times) and appointed Lepaute as his assistant. He prepared computing plans and she did the calculations for the almanac. Her work included calculations on a 1762 comet, and a table of parallactic angles, work on the Éphémerides, annual guides for astronomers and navigators, calculating the daily position of Saturn from 1775 to 1784 (for the seventh volume, in 1774). She calculated on her own the daily positions of the Sun, Moon and planets for the eighth volume (in 1784).</p><p>In 1762 she calculated the exact time and path of the annular solar eclipse of 1st of April, 1764. Under her own name, she published a map which showed the eclipse's extent over Europe (shown in green in my print), as well as the its successive phases in 15-minutes intervals as would be visible over Paris (shown in blue in my print).</p><p>She and her husband were childless but adopted his nephew, Joseph Lepaute Dagelet in 1768 and she trained him as a mathematician and astronomer. He became a professor and was inducted in the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1785.</p><p>Despite how vital, and Lalande's vocal appreciation, her work remained largely unrewarded and unrecognized during her lifetime. She worked as computer for Lalande for 15 years while he was a professor and director of the Paris Observatory. She did became a member of the distinguished Scientific Academy of Béziers in 1761, and calculated the ephemeris of the 1761 transit of Venus for them. Her eyesight after decades of calculation deteriorated to the point that she had to retire in 1783. She spent the end of her life caring for her terminally ill husband. After her death in 1788, Lalande wrote a biography of her contributions which he included in his Astronomical Bibliography. Both an asteroid (7720 Lepaute) and a lunar crater have posthumously been named in her honour.</p><p><b>For Balance, I made my portrait of <a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1383517882/lino-block-print-of-ancient-chinese?click_key=66918c290fe9ae4e8926cc675a3d176c3ca3b2f8%3A1383517882&click_sum=966b52ef&ref=shop_home_active_38">Zhang Heng</a> </b>(see previous post).</p><p><b>For Texture, </b>I made a print of an Eastern Snail Shell Mason Bee, <i>Osmia conjuncta</i>. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtRmWvnHGRQANpg7kFQVlus3BmdArNu_HxbkuBIba4jeP_8k21do1ZD5ufOjT2P88dcebo4JlBSkMDTEMNkGxfq2-nh3WONlWmSVZ-hk_JoeSmLbbewejBn4Ra5-J_0Hr4KDtaK3nvWlVRndUPjqgm5hOazxOix-wtPkXQHMwz4f8MXv92efBlJbU5UA/s1374/OsmiaConjunctaSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Eastern Snail Shell Mason Bee, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" border="0" data-original-height="1358" data-original-width="1374" height="395" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtRmWvnHGRQANpg7kFQVlus3BmdArNu_HxbkuBIba4jeP_8k21do1ZD5ufOjT2P88dcebo4JlBSkMDTEMNkGxfq2-nh3WONlWmSVZ-hk_JoeSmLbbewejBn4Ra5-J_0Hr4KDtaK3nvWlVRndUPjqgm5hOazxOix-wtPkXQHMwz4f8MXv92efBlJbU5UA/w400-h395/OsmiaConjunctaSq.jpg" title="Eastern Snail Shell Mason Bee, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2023" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1401318897/eastern-snail-shell-mason-bee-lino-block?click_key=c8dc2b9c1622c9b4182db4a841143f6790dbc129%3A1401318897&click_sum=dccfb849&ga_search_query=bee&ref=shop_items_search_1">Eastern Snail Shell Mason Bee</a>, linocut 8" x 8" on Japanese kozo paper, by Ele Willoughby, 2023</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The Packer Lab at York University posted an image of this mason bee, Osmia conduct, and explained that these adorable little blue snail shell nesting bees had now been observed in Canada (southern Ontario) and to be honest, I'm completely obsessed with the idea. I think it's the cutest thing I've ever heard. Apparently, they think these bees have become more common here because there are now so many of the Cepaea snails, introduced from Europe. So, while I couldn't find any images of this bee nesting, I illustrated it with a Cepaea shell. You can find images and video of other Osmia bees nesting in snail shells online. Many thanks to the friendly and helpful Entomology Twitter folks who helped me track down the right type of snail shell and even introduced me to researchers who said they would try to get video of these cuties next field season!</p><p>I will miss Science Twitter when it's gone.</p><p><b>References for scientist bios</b></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler">Johannes Kepler</a>, Wikipedia, accessed January 2023</p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Times; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole-Reine_Lepaute">Nicole-Reine Lepaute</a></span>, Wikipedia, accessed January 2023</p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Times; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Lalande">Jérôme Lalande</a></span>, Wikipedia, accessed January 2023</p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Times; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Clairaut">Alexis Clairaut</a></span>, Wikipedia, accessed January 20223</p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5px;">Lynn, W. T. (2 January 1911). <a href="https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1911Obs....34...87L"><span style="color: #522353;">"Madame Lepaute"</span></a>. <i>The Observatory</i>. <b>34</b>: 77–78. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibcode_(identifier)"><span style="color: #092f9d;">Bibcode</span></a>:<a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1911Obs....34...87L"><span style="color: #274fad;">1911Obs....34...87L</span></a>. </p><p style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 1.2px;"><span style="color: #18191a;">Bernardi, Gabriella (21 March 2016). <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=G-a9CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA121"><span style="color: blue;"><i>The Unforgetten Sisters: Female Astronomers and Scientists before Catherine Herschel</i></span></a>. Springer. pp. 121–127. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)"><span style="color: #092f9d;">ISBN</span></a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9783319261270"><span style="color: #092f9d;">9783319261270</span></a>.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #18191a; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 1.2px;">De La Lande, Jérôme (1803). <a href="https://archive.org/details/bibliographieast00lala/page/676/mode/2up?view=theater"><span style="color: #522353;"><i>Bibliographie astronomique avec l'histoire de l'astronomie depuis 1871 jusqu'à 1802</i></span></a> (in French). Paris: Imprimerie de la République. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)"><span style="color: #092f9d;">ISBN</span></a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-2329549170"><span style="color: #092f9d;">978-2329549170</span></a>. Archived from <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96149w/f4.item.texteImage#"><span style="color: #274fad;">the original</span></a> on 4 May 2010. </p><p style="background-color: white; color: #522353; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 1.2px;">Connor, Elisabeth (November 1944). <a href="https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1944ASPL....4..314C">"Mme. LePaute, An Eighteenth Century Computer"</a>. <i>Astronomical Society of the Pacific Leaflets</i>. <b>4</b> (189): 314–321. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibcode_(identifier)"><span style="color: #092f9d;">Bibcode</span></a>:<a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1944ASPL....4..314C"><span style="color: #274fad;">1944ASPL....4..314C</span></a>.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-84708004218123539202023-01-20T11:51:00.004-05:002023-01-20T11:51:40.330-05:00Ancient seismology and Chinese polymath Zhang Heng<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6CNzpRQY-Igl0vIKnecpyUcS8fqBvhFsiJ790_K0r15GWQTuw6NPdSczNuqRux1CxQD0MU2pgBmk8XKaHkGbMboe0A2s4QflE4e6bFpNQgMrfWjNSJDj-LWsUPMeAEBILg70077BQw0qHR2nUakDdDohdLqPxJkf3r26m5xGAIiMJFxkdI3Whksed1Q/s2000/ZhangHengSq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="2000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6CNzpRQY-Igl0vIKnecpyUcS8fqBvhFsiJ790_K0r15GWQTuw6NPdSczNuqRux1CxQD0MU2pgBmk8XKaHkGbMboe0A2s4QflE4e6bFpNQgMrfWjNSJDj-LWsUPMeAEBILg70077BQw0qHR2nUakDdDohdLqPxJkf3r26m5xGAIiMJFxkdI3Whksed1Q/w640-h640/ZhangHengSq.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail of linocut 'Zhang Heng' by Ele Willoughby, 2023 on 9" x 12" washi paper. </td></tr></tbody></table><br />This is a linocut print about the ancient Chinese Han Dynasty polymath and statesman Zhang Heng (78-139) who invented a device (a seismoscope, like a simplified seismometer which does not make a record of earth motions) to detect distant earthquakes and indicate their direction, 2000 years ago! I have shown him in blue with a reconstruction of his seismoscope, and a schematic of how it might have worked in bronze, as well as horizontal earthquake surface waves, and Rayleigh waves in particular, in pale pink.</p><p>A career civil servant in Nanyang, Zhang Heng (sometimes formerly written Chang Heng) was also an astronomer, mathematician, seismologist, hydraulic engineer, inventor, geographer, cartographer, ethnographer, artist, poet, philosopher, politician, and literary scholar. He was a bit of a controversial figure politically, sparing over calendar reform and with rivals amongst the palace eunuchs. But both his poetry and famous inventions are still remembered. He also improved the Chinese approximation for <span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(77, 81, 86); color: #4d5156; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.000000953674316px;">π</span> and made an extensive star catalog. He understood that the Sun and Moon are spherical, and that the Moon merely reflects the light of the Sun. He also explained the nature of solar and lunar eclipses. He invented the world's first water-powered armillary sphere for astronomical observation; improved the inflow water clock by adding another tank; and, as celebrated here, he invented the world's first seismoscope, which recorded distant earthquakes and their origin (in terms of 8 cardinal directions).</p><p>China is a seismically active place, and while the cause of earthquakes remained misunderstood, in 132 Zhang Heng was able to design a device to detect seismicity from distant sources. It was named "earthquake weathervane" (hòufēng dìdòngyí 候風地動儀), and it could roughly indicate where the earthquake came from. According to the Book of Later Han (compiled by Fan Ye in the 5th century), his bronze urn-shaped device, with a swinging pendulum inside, was able to detect the direction of an earthquake hundreds of miles/kilometers away. The outside of the device was described as having 8 dragons with balls in their mouths and 8 open-mouthed frogs around the base which could catch fallen balls (and indicate direction to the source). If there was an earthquake the dragon facing its location would drop a ball into the mouth of a frog below. The Book of Later Han claims that the device was triggered by an event, which was too subtle for people to feel but that the west-facing dragon drop its ball. Officials doubted the device worked as intended, but several days later a messenger arrived from the west and reported that an earthquake had occurred in Longxi (modern Gansu Province). So, the court acknowledged it in fact worked.</p><p>Unfortunately, no ancient Chinese seismoscopes have survived and details of the mechanism are sparse. The description of the detected earthquake was written much later. So, we cannot be certain about how it worked precisely; some even doubt that it did. Later Chinese inventors were not able to reconstruct the device. However, a series of modern seismologists have put forward a series of reconstructions. There are several ways a pendulum could trigger a ball to fall. Some of the questions include: was it a regular pendulum? Was it an inverted pendulum? How was its motion transferred to the appropriate dragon and not to any other dragons? How it avoid "false positives" due to other sources of shaking? </p><p>As a geophysicist myself, I find the contemporary reconstructions of Feng Rui and others pretty convincing, so that's what I have illustrated. These scientist argue that the device would have detected horizontal motions due to surface waves which would only be due to earthquakes, and would not be set off by vertical motions (which can be caused by earthquakes or nearby shaking, say, due to people). So they built a reconstruction which they argue is consistent with the description, but detects Rayleigh surface waves. They argue by adding a second ball inside the device, it could have avoided having two opposing dragons triggered. In their model, illustrated in my print, when there is an incoming wave, for instance, from the west, the pendulum would move from west to east. They made a hollow inside, so the pendulum would drop a ball, falling on the west side as it moves off-centre. The ball follows one of 8 radiating tracks, then pushes a lever connected to the dragon mouth and the west-side ball - and no others - would fall. This would correctly identify the direction.</p><p>They also make arguments explaining that some reconstructions are not the right style of urn or dragon, arguing that Han Dynasty dragons would have been much simpler than the fancy Ming Dynasty ones shown on some reconstructions. So my illustration tries to respect the archeology of ancient Han artifacts, as well as a mechanism which apparently avoids the pitfalls of previous reconstructions. I also included a waveform, which seismologists will recognize as a horizontal Rayleigh wave (detected by a modern seismograph).</p><p><b>Sources</b></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Heng#Zhang's_seismoscope">Zhang Heng</a>, wikipedia, accessed January 2023</p><p>Feng, Rui and Yu Yan-xiang, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11589-006-0704-1">Zhang Heng's Seismometer and Long earthquake in AD 134</a>, Acta Seismologica Sinica, 19, 704-719 (2006)</p><p>Feng, R., Wu, Y. Research on history of Chinese seismology. Earthq Sci 23, 243-257 (2010). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11589-010-0720-z">https://doi.org/10.1007/s11589-010-0720-z</a></p><p>Hong-Sen Yan, Kuo-Hung Hsiao, Reconstruction design of the lost seismoscope of ancient China, Mechanism and Machine Theory, Volume 42, Issue 12, 2007, Pages 1601-1617, ISSN 0094-114X, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmachtheory.2007.01.003.">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmachtheory.2007.01.003.</a></p><p><a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/zhang-heng-seismoscope">Zhang Heng Seismoscope</a>, Atlas Obscura </p><p>Jamie Rigg, <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2018-09-28-backlog-zhang-heng-seismoscope.html">The ancient earthquake detector that puzzled modern historians</a>, engaged, September 28, 2018</p><p>Andrew Robinson, <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231020-900-the-worlds-first-seismometer-used-a-toad-to-catch-an-earthquake/">The world's first seismometer used a toad to catch an earthquake</a>, New Scientist, 30 November 2016</p><h1 class="article__title" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Titillium Web", Helvetica, "Trebuchet MS", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 3.125rem; letter-spacing: -0.0375rem; line-height: 3.1875rem; margin: 0px 0px 1.25rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></h1>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6712311211123644484.post-9792025901083242842022-11-29T14:50:00.002-05:002022-11-29T14:51:13.555-05:00Barrel Cortex, and more Cyanotypes<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1319719313/neuroscientist-hendrik-van-der-loos-and?click_key=07c9bee33a0de005fcba66c2c6d89551f88d14e5%3A1319719313&click_sum=724d071d&ga_search_query=van%2Bder%2Bloos&ref=shop_items_search_1&pro=1"><img alt="Hendrik van der Loos linocut portrait by Ele Willoughby" border="0" data-original-height="2897" data-original-width="2248" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsjJGR5dpLsQQPm5sA8aVFCZuY11HXZbHz9pMFaRrYCMZ4vr7COr35CGNOgyeggK8nEKWcsazj88ip_E6sg6CGSrTd5x6oUS4UI7tDQ58-SnqWrvynAlpCwWaBL8Xp-WgWOzKWD7q-4rrOup5ZzQdaVmkNPhOjalmNa4Lsb0BIe9wPO363cuN_q4wVIg/w496-h640/HendrikVanDerLoos-1.jpg" title="Hendrik van der Loos linocut portrait by Ele Willoughby" width="496" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1319719313/neuroscientist-hendrik-van-der-loos-and?click_key=07c9bee33a0de005fcba66c2c6d89551f88d14e5%3A1319719313&click_sum=724d071d&ga_search_query=van%2Bder%2Bloos&ref=shop_items_search_1&pro=1">Hendrik van der Loos, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2022</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;">This was a custom order I made earlier this fall: <a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1319719313/neuroscientist-hendrik-van-der-loos-and?click_key=07c9bee33a0de005fcba66c2c6d89551f88d14e5%3A1319719313&click_sum=724d071d&ga_search_query=van%2Bder%2Bloos&ref=shop_items_search_1&pro=1">A </a></span><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1319719313/neuroscientist-hendrik-van-der-loos-and?click_key=07c9bee33a0de005fcba66c2c6d89551f88d14e5%3A1319719313&click_sum=724d071d&ga_search_query=van%2Bder%2Bloos&ref=shop_items_search_1&pro=1"><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span color="rgb(var(--ig-link))" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; font-size: 14px; list-style: none; touch-action: manipulation;">linocut</span></span><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"> of </span><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span color="rgb(var(--ig-link))" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; font-size: 14px; list-style: none; touch-action: manipulation;">neuroscientist</span></span></a><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"><a href="https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1319719313/neuroscientist-hendrik-van-der-loos-and?click_key=07c9bee33a0de005fcba66c2c6d89551f88d14e5%3A1319719313&click_sum=724d071d&ga_search_query=van%2Bder%2Bloos&ref=shop_items_search_1&pro=1"> Hendrik Van der Loos</a> (1929-1993) and his discovery (along with medical student Thomas Woolsey), of the barrel cortex, along with the mouse head & whiskers linked directly to it.</span></p><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;">Some species of rodents have a region of the somatosensory cortex that was named the </span><a class="x1i10hfl xjbqb8w x6umtig x1b1mbwd xaqea5y xav7gou x9f619 x1ypdohk xt0psk2 xe8uvvx xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r xexx8yu x4uap5 x18d9i69 xkhd6sd x16tdsg8 x1hl2dhg xggy1nq x1a2a7pz _aa9_ _a6hd" href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/barrelcortex/" role="link" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(var(--ig-link)); cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; word-wrap: break-word;" tabindex="0">#barrelcortex</a><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"> after its shape, and which contains the barrel field. The 'barrels' of the barrel field stain darker than neighbouring regions (within cortical layer IV) when stained to reveal the presence of cytochrome c oxidase. These dark-staining regions are a major target for somatosensory inputs from the thalamus of the </span><a class="x1i10hfl xjbqb8w x6umtig x1b1mbwd xaqea5y xav7gou x9f619 x1ypdohk xt0psk2 xe8uvvx xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r xexx8yu x4uap5 x18d9i69 xkhd6sd x16tdsg8 x1hl2dhg xggy1nq x1a2a7pz _aa9_ _a6hd" href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/brain/" role="link" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(var(--ig-link)); cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; word-wrap: break-word;" tabindex="0">#brain</a><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;">, & each barrel corresponds to a region of the body! Most distinctively, the whisker barrels, structures were first discovered by Woolsey & Van der Loos in 1970, come in an array, similar to the way whiskers are arrayed & they hypothesized that they could be matched up & each barrel represents 1 whisker. Due to this distinctive cellular structure, organisation, & functional significance, the barrel cortex is a useful tool to understand cortical processing & has played an important role in neuroscience. The majority of what is known about corticothalamic processing comes from studying the barrel cortex, and researchers have intensively studied the barrel cortex as a model of neocortical column. The whisker barrels are the focus of the majority of barrel cortex research, and 'barrel cortex' is often used to refer primarily to the whisker barrels.</span><div><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijRR-dtpPOIzelTArtEdf2LKnyXGkYZeN3C_m7lbN-qAFyTiYgyVxu_zwX5uKscvSV1pNM1Hj5buf4CHS3TINQI1iDhgnrccN35Wcg-jgQtYpQO4sbp44_re4zx9NcamlxpOQC5fKxoaHBm7aZjXAo-lFAsqtsu18C2GoA53HSzO-fscLcF3RvYFUSQQ/s2138/SkeletonCyanotypeBig.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Cyanotype skeleton by Ele Willoughby" border="0" data-original-height="1633" data-original-width="2138" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijRR-dtpPOIzelTArtEdf2LKnyXGkYZeN3C_m7lbN-qAFyTiYgyVxu_zwX5uKscvSV1pNM1Hj5buf4CHS3TINQI1iDhgnrccN35Wcg-jgQtYpQO4sbp44_re4zx9NcamlxpOQC5fKxoaHBm7aZjXAo-lFAsqtsu18C2GoA53HSzO-fscLcF3RvYFUSQQ/w640-h488/SkeletonCyanotypeBig.jpg" title="Cyanotype skeleton by Ele Willoughby" width="640" /></a></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv_UBe9V7qaa4ASSzM0SkPVvF74g58FAqhvQdCJqINgmFcjSmKmwEbziMH8WbX6sA_KKbxim7JdZZ5Ql6Q0grTLdDX865W30BuLhN70NTsZ11crOzbzuOnF99GTPyarCB3enI8cmsp-LfhVpus-3lR80q-01R79IEHrCqe4b25glDipDDksthPeJbtqQ/s3230/SkeletonCyanotype%202.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Cyanotype skeleton" border="0" data-original-height="2230" data-original-width="3230" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv_UBe9V7qaa4ASSzM0SkPVvF74g58FAqhvQdCJqINgmFcjSmKmwEbziMH8WbX6sA_KKbxim7JdZZ5Ql6Q0grTLdDX865W30BuLhN70NTsZ11crOzbzuOnF99GTPyarCB3enI8cmsp-LfhVpus-3lR80q-01R79IEHrCqe4b25glDipDDksthPeJbtqQ/w400-h276/SkeletonCyanotype%202.jpeg" title="Cyanotype skeleton" width="400" /></a><br /><br /><br /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption">Cyanotype skeletons by Ele Willoughby<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;">I made several cyanotypes of my skeleton linocut on acetate along with leaves and wildflowers. A couple turned out quite pale and ghostly with the skeleton barely visible. So I made a linocut on top. I like the effect. It's a little eerie or dreamlike.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><div><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0