One recent sunny day, I made some new cyanotypes, and also took the time to tone and tint some previous cyanotypes.
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| Skeleton Amongst Tulips, cyanotype by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
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| Virginia creeper and red admiral butterfly cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
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| Willow cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
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| Virginia Creeper and Lemon Balm Cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
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| Paroster macrosturtensis, linocut print, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
The other two #InsertAnInvert2024 prompts were troglofauna or cave fauna and stygofauna or subterranean but aquatic fauna.
This is a hand-printed of the Paroster macrosturtensis beetle, a blind predatory subterranean diving water beetle from the calcrete aquifers of the Western Australian desert. Trapped underground for million of years as the calcrete caves formed these beetles have evolved to no longer have eyes. It is printed on 8" x 8" Japanese paper.
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| Neoniphargidae, 8" x 8" linocut print by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
This is a hard-carved and hand-printed linocut print of a little semi-transparent, white amphipod crustacean in the Neoniphargidae group from the Pilbara. This is a large, dry, sparsely populated region in northern part of Western Australia which is a global biodiversity hotspot for subterranean fauna including aquatic animals that live in groundwater called stygofauna like this. Stygofauna can live in subterranean caves but most commonly live in alluvial, karstic or fractured rock aquifers within pore space and fractures in the rock. In the absence of light, stygofauna lack eyes and pigmentation. Stygofauna have evolved and survived over millions of years in the ecologically important Pilbara groundwater environment.
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| Long-tailed Ichneumoid Wasp, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
Next up for #InsertAnInvert2023 is my hand-printed lino block print on 8" x 8" Japanese washi paper of Megarhyssa macrurus, the long-tailed ichneumoid wasp or ichneumon wasp. It's a parasitoid wasp and its "long-tail" is in fact it's extremely long ovipositor which you can see looping from its back end into the tree. The wasp uses it to deposit an egg into a tunnel in dead wood bored by its host, the larva of a similarly large species of horntail or wood wasp. Its body is up to 51 mm long and the ovipositor on the female wasps can be 130 mm. It can be found in the eastern US and southern Canada around the Great Lakes.
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| Blue Velvet Worm, linocut 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
July is Subterranean month, which as it turns out, requires some new art. Here's a sneak peek! I stuck fairly close to the first prompt, simply choosing a different velvet worm, than the one suggested, because the colour is so gorgeous. Hence, my Blue Velvet Worm. Velvet worms (phylum: Onychophora) are named for their velvet-like texture and somewhat wormlike appearance. They are elongate, soft-bodied, many-legged nocturnal animals who spit slime to trap prey, somewhere between worms and arthropods. Like an arthropod their heads have segments but otherwise they have wormlike bodies. They have flexible wormlike skin but like insect skeleton in composition. They have insect-like limbs, but they are unjointed and conical in shape. They look like caterpillars who don't become butterflies. The two extant families of velvet worms are Peripatidae and Peripatopsidae. And amongst the latter there are some in the genus Peripatoides which exhibits lecithotrophic ovoviviparity; that is, mothers in this genus produce and retain yolky eggs in their uteri. The eggs are fertilized internally, and babies develop inside their mother until large enough to be born, in batches of 4–6, as colourless miniatures of the parents! Peripatoides novaezealandiae is a species complex of velvet worms in the genus Peripatoides, found throughout New Zealand. This print is made based on photos of P. aurorbis, but all the Peripatoides novaezealandiae have no morphological characters that distinguish them.
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| Glowworm Caves, linocut in regular and glow-in-the-dark ink, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
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| Glowworm Caves, linocut in regular and glow-in-the-dark ink, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024, shot in the dark so you can see how it glows. |
Third week was troglofauna, or invertebrates who live in caves. I strayed from the suggested species, because I wanted to illustrate invertebrates I travelled to see, in the glowworm caves of Waitomo. My love of bioluminescence overcame my claustrophobia, and I was proud I ventured into caves, even where it was a tight squeeze.
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| Glowworm cave photo by by Rap, Raft 'n' Rock, Waitomo |
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| That's me, photo by Rap, Raft 'n' Rock, Waitomo, May 2010 |
On the North Island of New Zealand or Aotearoa, there are caves near
Waitomo with large populations of Arachnocampa luminosa, a glowworm
(insect larvae and adult larviform females that glow through
bioluminescence) native to the country.
In the limestone caves,
these glowworms, a species of fungus gnat endemic to New Zealand, dot
the ceilings with glowing light like blue constellations in the night
sky. The larval stage and the imago produce a blue-green
bioluminescence. They are found in caves and sheltered banks where
humidity is high, hence its Māori name "titiwai", meaning "projected
over water." They lay eggs on cave walls and the glowing 3 to 5 mm larva
emerge, generally in the spring, and select a site to begin producing
its silk nest where it will grow to 30 to 40 mm over several months.
The
larva spins silk nests on cave ceilings from where they hang up to 30
threads along which it regularly places small sticky droplets to trap
prey like other small Diptera (especially midges), spiders and other
non-flying invertebrates. Prey is attracted by the bioluminescence and
then sticks to the threads. When prey gets stuck, the larva pulls it up
by ingesting the snare and starts feeding on the prey alive.
These
are a limited edition reduction lino block print. Each is made with
glow in the dark ink, so the 8" x 8" prints themselves glow like the
glowworms.
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| Humpback and Barnacle, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
This month is parasite month for #InsertAnInvert2024, so I have been kind of dancing around the prompts and choosing somewhat different species than those suggested, cause, to be quite honest, some of these inverts give me the creeps. For the first two prompts I chose plant rather than animal parasites and reposted art I had previously made: the Dropsophila (fruit fly) and carmine prints. For the third week a shark barnacle was a suggested species, but I decided to look at the whale barnacles.
This hand-printed lino block print with gel plate printed
areas is about Coronula diadema, a barnacle which specializes in
humpback and some other baleen whales. Each print is 20.3 cm x 20.3 cm
(8" x 8") on lovely Japanese mulberry paper and shows the humpback whale
swimming above and a close up of the whale below with six barnacles.
The
Coronula diadema name comes from its barrel and crown-like shape, which
can grow to 5 cm (2") tall and 6 cm (2.4") in diameter. They are common
to abundant on humpback whales. Barnacles are actually crustaceans, and
C. diadema has 6 plates and a hexagonal opening on top, protected with a
pair of opercular valves. The hermaphrodite parasites cluster together
in order to breed. The barnacles use the whales as host, and the whales
may in turn use the barnacles as a sort of armour and to inflict more
damage when fighting in mating battles or against predators. So theirs
is a likely a mutually beneficial relationship and are considered
commensals.
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| Joseph Fourier, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
French mathematician and physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) is best remembered for his work Fourier series, Fourier transforms, Fourier’s law of conduction, Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis and their use to solve heat transfer problems. He is also often credited with proposing the greenhouse effect as early as 1824.
Born in Auxerre, a son of a tailor, he was orphaned at age nine. Recommended to the Bishop of Auxerre, he was educated by the Benedictine Order of the Convent of St. Mark. Being a commoner he could not seek a commission in the scientific corps of the army but took a military lectureship in mathematics. He took a prominent part in promoting the French Revolution in his district. Nonetheless he was briefly imprisoned by the Terror. In 1795 he was appointed to the École Normale and later succeeded Lagrange at the École Polytechnique. After accompanying Napoleon as a scientific adviser on his Egyptian expedition in 1798 he was appointed secretary of the Institut d’Egypte, where he organized workshops for the French to make munitions, wrote several papers for the Egyptian Institute (now Cairo Institute). He returned to France in 1801 after the British victories, to resume work at the École Polytechnique but Napoleon appointed him Prefect of the Department of Isère in Grenoble. In Grenoble he began to experiment on the propagation of heat, and contributed to the comprehensive catalogue Description de l’Égype.
In 1820 he published his theorem on polynomial real roots, that a polynomial with real coefficients has a real root between any two consecutive zeros of its derivative. (This is technically a corollary of a theorem published by Budan in 1807 and 1811, also now known as Fourier’s theorem). In 1822 he succeeded Delambre as Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, and he published his heat flow research in his Théorie analytique de la chaleur (The Analytical Theory of Heat) which included his important claim that any function of a variable, continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable. The idea is true (with some conditions, later discovered by Dirichlet) and a breakthrough. This is the foundation for what we call the Fourier transform, an invaluable tool in math, physics and engineering. During the 1820s he realized that the Earth, at its distance from the Sun should be colder is it is only heated by solar radiation. He wrongly thought Earth has must then receive significant radiation from interstellar space but he did consider the correct answer that the atmosphere acts as an insulator. He referred to experiments by Saussure who measured temperature in a vase with several inset panes of glass, who noted that the inner chambers (under more glass) become hotter. Fourier noted that if the atmosphere makes a layer like the glass in the vase we would get the same effect on Earth (though he noted that Saussure’s experiment did not account for the convection we get in the atmosphere). This is now recognized as the first conception of what we know as the greenhouse effect.
He became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in 1830. He experienced heart aneurysms in both Egypt and Grenoble and died 16 May 1830. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetary in Paris in a tomb with an Egyptian motif and his name is one of 72 inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
My portrait (inspired by the portrait by Boilly) alludes to Fourier decomposition: the sine waves sum to the violet waveform framing him. With an infinite series of sines, his very outline, as a function of x (the horizontal axis across the page) could be made. Likewise the circles in the background are another visualization of building up an image of Fourier himself from sine waves. If you trace the perimeter of a circle on a continuously advancing sheet of paper you produce a sine wave. (Mathematicians and physicists often use this equivalency to think of a real sinusoid as the real part of a complex function where a vector formed by by its real and imaginary parts traces a circle around the origin). So a simplified function tracing the main lines in Bouilly’s portrait can be produced by the sum of sine waves produced by tracing the series of these epicycle circles.
There are a lot of great tutorials about this online, but a particular shout out to 3Blue1Brown on YouTube who not only has an excellent series of videos (it's everything you ever wanted to know about Fourier series but were afraid to ask) but he's also specifically made animations of producing a path that approximates Bouilly's portrait with rotating vectors or Fourier epicycles here.
May is crustacean month for #InsertAnInvert2024. Playing on the idea of carcinisation, the process by which again and again, other crustaceans keep evolving crab-like bodies, the prompts are "crab," "false crab," "not crab" - and, shudder, "really not crab." Some of the non-crab crustacean abominations are, well, in my subjective opinion, nightmare fuel, so I veered off the path of suggested species and found a cute but distinctly non-crab crustacean for you. Also, it was a cue to try different print media.
First up is "true crab" and I had my frog crab ready, from the warm colour prompt for Printer Solstice.
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| Frog crab, linocut, 8" x 8" Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
Next up was false crab, so I re-shared my porcelain crab.
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| Porcelain crab linocut, 8" x 10", Ele Willoughby, 2021 |
Then was "not a crab" - I cheated a bit by sharing another false crab: the yeti crab. It has crab in its name but it's really closer to a squat lobster.
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| Yeti crab linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2020 |
The last prompt is "really not a crab" with some suggestions that I honestly did not feel like contemplating at length. There are some scary looking crustaceans out there!
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| Daphina longispina, Tetrapak drypoint, 4" x 6" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
Instead, I went for the adorable microscope (1 to 5 mm) planktonic crustacean Daphina or water flea! Daphina longispina is a wee little freshwater water flea found worldwide in bodies of water from the size of rock pools to large lakes. They are filter feeders who mainly eat algae. This one is a female full of green eggs. I made this print using an actual Tetrapak juice container. I etched in the fine lines and peeled a bit of the surface material for coloured areas, then pushed ink into the etched areas with some card, and wiped away the excess ink. I cut my plate in a circle to suggest that this is a view through a microscope. I was able to pull a few prints on dampened watercolour paper using my etching press.
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| Turtles, all the way down, world, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
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| Turtles, all the way, North America, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
Turtles from North America are:
1 - Bog Turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii)
2 - Spotted Turtle (Clemmys guttata)
3 - Eastern Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina)
4 - Diamondback Terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin)
5 - Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta)
6 - Alligator Snapping Turtle (Macrochelys temminckii)
My original Turtles, all the way down:
Turtles, All the Way Down, 11" x 14" (27.9 cm x 35.6 cm)
linocut with chine-collé by Ele Willoughby, 2016
The turtles in my original print are from the top we have an eastern mud turtle (Kinosternon subrubrum), a red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans), a black pond turtle (Geoclemys hamiltonii), a painted batagur (Batagur borneoensis), a Oaxaca mud turtle (Kinosternon oaxacae), a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) and the hint of something larger.
