The Art of Karen Carr

Posted by Alex H. |1 comments

I'd like to direct your browsers to the online home page for international wildlife and natural history artist Karen Carr and Karen Carr Studio, Inc.

Here artwork is incredible and demonstrates a world-class level of care for her topics. I even read (but lost the source) that when she worked with traditional media and was attempting to portray a scene or organism underwater, she would snorkel and make sketches underwater (presumably with waterproof materials!). I had come across her art several times in my internetting, but never realized that it was all mostly from one woman!

Here website and online gallery are easy to navigate and contain a treasure trove of wonderful biodiversity - alive or extinct. She also posts directions on how she paints digitally, which is neat.

Her best known work and association is with The Field Museum in Chicago, IL, an incredible museum of natural history.

The following images are samples of her work (all copyright Karen Karr and are available on her website):

PS - if you find yourself interested in illustrating natural science (I know I am!), check out the website for the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI).

Museum of Living Art (MOLA) - Now Open

Posted by Alex H. |1 comments

As summer approaches, I am getting mixed news about what I'll be doing for the next few months. I had applied to several internships, but none of them had positions open :/

One place that I am interested in is the Forth Worth Zoo. I had a post at the beginning of the year which described the zoo and a new exhibit - the Museum of Living Art (MOLA). This exhibit replaces their Herpetarium built in 1960.

Upon visiting the FW Zoo's website, I see that MOLA opened in March of this year!

Check out their over-the-top promotional videos here or here.

The size and scope of the exhibit are phenomenal. The 30,000 sq. ft. facility houses (at current) around 1,000 individuals representing a hundred different species of reptiles and amphibians.

I'm super-pumped! I'll report in when I have the chance to visit them next.

Update: When searching for images for this article, I spotted one of my pictures in the top results of a Google Search. Moving up the food chain. We also recently hit 1,000 pageviews. Hooray!:

Lots of Stuff - Videos, Snake Bites and More!

Posted by Alex H. |0 comments

Here's the setup.  Whenever I find something I think would make an interesting post on this blog, I bookmark it with intentions of writing an article at some point.  That happens for the things with some substance, but over time, I have accumulated all kinds of internet knick-knacks that I'd like to share in one large post.

• Here's a neat one. On this website, you can view high-quality, color, streaming video of a nesting Red Tailed Hawk (tipoff from here). The nest is located in Philadelpha, PA at the Franklin Institute Building. Here's a screencap of what I saw when I visited :)

• A study has found that denim denim may guard against rattlesnake bites. Read the fine print, as the study was just measuring the amount of venom that was injected into warm saline-solution filled gloves - not necessarily accounting for physical damage or psychological damage (I think you'd be a bit freaked out if you were bit by a poisonous snake!). Nonetheless, it's an interesting read (especially since I'm always wearing denim jeans).

• A species of frog thought to be extinct in the wild for 30 years has been rediscovered on farmland in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales state of Australia. The Yellow-Spotted Bell Frogs are quite adorable and the article notes optimism for similarly-"lost" species. Seven of Australia's 216 known species of frogs have disappeared in the last thirty years.

• Impress your friends with this compendium of collective nouns for animals. Where else would you hear about a murder of ravens, a pounce of cats, or a parliament of owls?
• A punk band named REPTILES. You can listen to their music here.
• When looking for advice on how to draw reptiles, I encountered this humorously-simple description of how to draw amphibians and reptiles.
• Some great underwater photography from one of my favorite blogs, The Flying Kiwi.
• Cool fluorescent coral (via Deep Sea News):

Hope that was enough for you! I'll continue updating throughout the week as I tactfully do not do homework before finals week.

Art and Biodiversity

Posted by Alex H. |0 comments

I love combining topics. My field of study is a combination of biology, psychology, and ecology; I'm attending a liberal arts institution, as a Boy Scout I earned over 60 merit badges (far above average), and the list goes on. When all is said and done, my favorite combination of two topics is animals and artwork (as can be witnessed by a previous post of mine). I'm just giddy to see two of my favorite topics combining with such a natural feel!

My passion for seeing art and animal diversity combined may be why I have been drawn to a couple of articles lately.

First check out this summary of a project done by an undergraduate through the School for Field Studies (SFS). This student organized the painting of several murals in Baja, Mexico emphasizing the conservation of sea turtles. That's herpetology, conservation biology, and artwork - all rolled into one!

Additionally, my academic adviser relayed this neat project to me: The Hyperbolic Coral Reef. Here's a quote from their website:

The Institute For Figuring is crocheting a coral reef: a wooly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.

What a wild idea, right? There's a lot going on here, but to summarize, a feminist crocheting organization has responded to declining coral reefs by expressing their beauty in a knitted form. Using a fairly new style of knitting, "hyperbolic crochet," inanimate yarn is 'brought to life' in the form of corals, anemones, urchins, you name it. One of the organization's representatives, Margaret Wertheim delivered a lecture on our campus yesterday, but unfortunately, I arrived at the wrong location and missed the boat. Bummer luck, but their expansive website should please your visual palate.

Share your favorite art-fusion links in the comments below.

Here are a few more pictorial examples:

Review - "Zoo: Animals in Art"

Posted by Alex H. |0 comments

"Zoo: Animals in Art" by Edward Lucie-Smith is a neat little coffee table-type book succinctly reviewing depictions of non-human animals in human-made art.

By categorizing groups of images and works into categories such as "Water World" and "Microcosmos," the author organizes the books contents into an easily-digested format.

I compliment the Lucie-Smith's variety of animal species (and inclusion of imaginary beasts) portrayed on a huge variety of media. Cats, fish, elephants, and butterflies alike are portrayed on canvas, tapestry, ming vase, or Roman floor mosaic. Additionally, the stretch of time period works were pulled from was expansive, ranging from 10,000 BCE cave paintings to roughly 1997 (a year before the book's copyright date).

While the book excels in some areas, it's hard not to notice a few flaws. Notably, the "superwide" style format forces the author to crop and zoom in on images strangely. This sometimes left me wondering what the rest of the image contains - quite frustrating! Interestingly, neither South American, aboriginal, or native American artwork made much of an appearance at all. If going for the all-over approach, some digital art pieces would have felt welcome.

Overall: 4/5

I'm including a few of my favorite pieces (some are images by artists whose works are in the book, but the image itself is not included):

Flowers That Fly. Oil on canvas, 46" x 66", Leonard Koscianski, 2008.

Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago.

Cat Catching a Bird. Pablo Picasso, 1939.

Umbrian Chair. Ditz, 1987.

Parlour Iguana. 40" x 30", Kendahl Jan Jubb. ~1990s

Chameleon: from Lives of the Animals. Alfred Brehm, 1892.