Reflection, Moon and Ocean Linocut & a Tattoo

Last fall, Tina Gleason contacted to ask my permission to get a version of my 'Reflection' linocut tattooed on her arm. She lamented that the linocut itself is no longer available. It's unusual for me, but Reflection was a reduction linocut. That means that I first carved the block to produce the 'background' silver layer and printed it on lovely dark blue Japanese washi with silk fibres. Then I carved further to produce the upper white layer. That means that 'Reflection' is limited edition. I cannot print more since the block for the silver layer exists no more. You may recall that another of my prints once inspired a tattoo, which I take as a great compliment. I was glad to hear she wanted my blessing and very flattered that she felt so strongly that she wanted the image permanently tattooed on her body - her first tattoo! She wrote today to say she finally found the right tattoo artist and had the image tattooed on her forearm by Deirdre Doyle in Cambridge, MA. Above you can see the original linocut, the sketch on her arm and the final tattoo. I love how this sort of transmission of artistic ideas, where the translation to another medium means that something altogether new is created. To me this sort of reinvention, especially for something non-commercial, and in fact personal and intimate, is using the image as inspiration to create a derivative work which I can and do welcome!

Art for Kids

I had a pleasant surprise this morning. I often check the Etsy blog every day, but this last week RJH took a vacation and we've been taking some time to make sure we're prepared for the baby. He's done a huge amount of work building furniture, and we made some purchases. Somehow it seems more real, now that we have a car seat and stroller. Decorating and preparing the nursery is an on-going project, of course. So, this morning I was particularly interested to see the Etsy blog article Art Scouting: Picks for Kids thinking I could gather some more ideas. I love that cover shot and spent some time contemplating how the T.Rex image was made. I scrolled down and was delighted to see my own 'Sailing Ship IV' featured! It and another in the series are already packaged to go to the post office this morning, since they sold yesterday (though I didn't clue in that my print had been mentioned till this morning). I do love the idea that art for kids can serve as a starting point for bedtime stories. RJH has been advocating bold, simple works for babies and that maybe the multimedia work will be better a little later (once the baby's vision is more fully developped.... after all, they can barely focus more than a foot away when they arrive). He might have a point, but I confess, I'm looking forward to the magic of imaginative bedtime story telling - and more complex art too!

There's still several ships in the series, by the way, and reproductions of a couple of the sold one of kind prints in the series are available too. There's some fabulous prints by fellow Printsy members; Cecca's Crocodile Tea Time has been in my favorites for a long time and I love Natalia the Winged Lion's prints as much as her imaginative handcrafted jewellery, as well as some artists who are new to me.

Reading is sexy LI

(image credit: Chris Silas Neal)
12. The Sea - A Cultural History by John Mack This was an very interesting book, though somehow it didn't quite keep me engaged. I would recommend this book as an interesting read, perhaps in small doses, along with some other reading. In fairness, I think I am not well disposed to reading uncorrected page proofs (like this one). I do get caught in details.* The one thing I would have preferred in fact would be more. Some of the things which interest me, like (obviously) marine science**, exploration, map making, the depths, shipwrecks, and women at sea, naval architecture and piracy are given short shrift. I think this book could easily have grown into a much larger project. As it is, it's more of an anthropological, sociological and English literature history (with a touch of art history) of the sea than a full cultural history of the sea - which is a fascinating thing, but not a complete thing. I did particularly appreciate the careful study of cultural differences in navigation. In the west (particularly the Mediterranean) we historically focus on a tradition of 'coasting' (travelling from port to port, largely within sight of shore) and we give a lot of credit to explorers' "discoveries" (of inhabited, clearly already discovered places). Too often we learn western history as world history, so the details on Ibn M jid and 15th century navigation in the Arab world were refreshing. I appreciated the contrast between (southern) European methods with the tradition of navigation in the Arab world (which largely involved knowing the monsoonal weather patterns and latitudes of all ports, finding the requisite latitude and going straight across a line of latitude). This in turn can be contrasted with the Polynesian navigation tradition, which was more about relative headings maintained with reference to astronomical cues in the presence of currents, wind and waves. In an oceanic world dotted with small islands, the sea is viewed as connecting, rather than separating people. I also enjoyed learning of societies like the Sea Gypsies of Malaya, who, as near as possible, live on the ocean.
(image: by

 *Like most people who go to sea, I admire Captain Cook and thus was stumped when I read about his contributions to "geography and hydrology". Hydrology? Cook did many things, but nothing like the work of hydrologists I know (who study the action of water in geology). Eventually I concluded that this was a typo and hydrography was intended - something more obviously paired with geography, after all. But, I wasted a lot of time puzzling over this. Also, when the Nootka people of BC are described as living on an island west of "Victoria Island" it really annoys me; there is no "Victoria" island. I know it's confusing that Vancouver is on mainland and Victoria is on Vancouver Island, but since the Nootka were mentioned when discussing Captain Vancouver, you think it might have occurred to someone. It's the largest Pacific island east of New Zealand, so it's sort of hard to miss. I don't think most people would be irked by such details (unless they happen to have lived on Vancouver Island and done marine geophysical research off Nootka Island).

**SCIENCE IS PART OF CULTURE.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL,XLI, XLII, XLIII,XLIV, XLV, XLVI, XLVII, XLVIII, XLIX, L}

N is for narwhal and nautilus

Lastest monogram is n, for narwhal and nautilus, of course. They are really quite tiny. That's a thumb-sized narwhal.

Horse Latitudes

I've been reading a cultural history of the sea and it inspired me to illustrate the 'horse latitudes' (with horses galloping across the subtropical highs upon the Pacific, of course).



It is printed by hand on lovely Japanese kozo (or mulberry paper), 11 inches by 12.5 inches (27.9 cm by 31.8 cm), in an edition of 12.

I carved a view of the hemisphere, complete with all the islands and continents in reverse, showing the major trade wind patterns. The winds travel consistently east to west along the hot equator, west to east in high latitudes like the 'roaring 40s', but at the horse latitudes, between 30 and 35 degrees, both north and south, in the region of the subtropical highs known as the horse latitudes, things are not so predictable. It is consistently warm and dry, but winds are variable, which, once upon a time, could be terrifying to sailors. I've illustrated the horse latitudes with actual little horses, galloping around the planet. Since this this print is about the sea, it is the oceans which are 'positive' (printed in ink) and the land which is the negative space. Sometimes we look at the oceans as the space which separates the land masses, but it is possible to have the opposite view or consider the oceans as what connects us all. I love the unexpectedness of this name, and playing with words.

The origins of the term are debated. Some claim that the name comes from sailor's "dead horse" ritual, during which they would beat a straw effigy of a horse and then throw it overboard; they did this to celebrate having worked off their "dead horse time" (the period they were in debt to the paymaster, since they spent their advance pay too quickly, ending up broke by the time a westbound ship from Europe could reach the horse latitudes). Others claim that Spanish colonial ships to the New World, laden with horses, would risk being becalmed in the doldrums or horse latitudes, and when fresh water ran scarce, the horses were the first to go (though this might be a mere folk legend).

The typography of the word horse is designed to suggest the animal, with its mane and hooves. The horses themselves are inspired by Muybridge's early photos, showing their motion. I've also very specifically chosen the view of our Earth. We have many biases in maps; we expect north to be up, but that's arbitrary, and here in North America we expect to see the Americas on the left (because we read left to right). But, in this print, it's all about the Pacific, so it goes in the middle.

I'm really proud of writing that description without feeling compelled to try and first explain about Hadley cells. That took restraint.

Bay of Fundy and the Joggins Fossil Cliffs

So we left the Hopewell Rocks and headed north, through Moncton, where we didn't stop. RJH had to live there for a year, and it remains on his list of least favorite places, though he confessed he may be biased. We stopped briefly in Sackville, where I had to photograph the ladies' room sign for my stickmen-in-peril series. The men's room figure did not show any such signs of desperation, so it was a pretty funny comment on gender (& bladder size/propensity to stop driving to let the other person use the facilities, etc.). We stopped again for ice cream, which was good, though served by the world's least enthusiastic ice cream scooper. "I hate ice cream," she said, "and it's nothing by ice cream, all summer. I do like popsicles though." After the 2 minute tour of Mount Allison University, we went across to Nova Scotia and headed for Joggins.

We had read about the fossils, but were unsure of what to expect. It was almost 4 pm and we were worried about paying admission, closing time, and high tide, at this UNESCO World Heritage Site (for those keeping score, this was number four, after Peggy's Cove, Lunenberg, and the Hopewell Rocks). When we got there however, we found that there was no admission fee unless you go to the museum and we were free to explore on our own as long as we want, though we were given some stern advice about the tides as this is also on the Bay of Fundy. Incredibly, the museum at this amazing site -a site instrumental to Charles Lyell's thinking and hence to his friend Darwin's Theory of Evolution - receives no Provincial or Federal funding. RJH pointed out that there's really nothing stopping anyone from walking off with large pieces of fossilized Carboniferous (359 to 299 Million Years Ago) trees! I do think Canada should protect this place; it is part of World Heritage.

Actually, based on this stickman in peril panel, the warnings about walking the shoreline could have been more severe. In hindsight, we were too close to the cliffs, in an effort to avoid the rising tide. I started seeing fossils as soon as we got to the beach. Generally I use the geologist's trick of photographing rocks with something (a dime with the Bluenose, as this is Nova Scotia) for scale. It was very easy to pick out the coal stream in the cliff face strata. Click on any photo to see a larger version, or the full photo stream (where there are more fossils).






See! It's a tropical tree. Right there. Nothing for scale - it was regular tree-trunk size.













By the time we finished our walk, the museum was closed. Since we were concerned how far we could get before we would need a hotel for the night, we did not follow the coast along the Bay, but cut down to Parrsboro. We saw the coast from the highway and took a small road to the water, somewhere between Parrsboro and Economy. Because I'm silly I was highly amused by the town of 'Lower Economy'.





We spent the night in Truro (also on RJH's list of least favorite places), but we did manage to find a restaurant which wasn't serving fast food. I'm glad to report we never resorted to McLobster.