Cities of Dreams

        I’ve been on a bit of an architecture kick, perhaps as a reaction to all those imaginary creatures.  One recent piece is a real building, which I’ll share some other time, but here are a couple of others, just as imaginary as the creatures, but with a refreshing dose of geometry.  There’s no particular rhyme or reason to these cities; they’re really just doodles of whatever struck my fancy, but I’ll share a few of the things I was thinking about.

     1. Variety is the spice of life.  I was enjoying trying to throw in a little of everything, but especially towers: steeples, skyscrapers, minarets, turrets, spires, from different architectural styles of different times and places…

     2. We’re better together.  I didn’t want the buildings separate, each on their own; I wanted them to be connected so that imaginary people can easily go from one to the next, visit their neighbors, attend events in any building, and really consider the whole city their home…

     3. Grey is beautiful.  I don’t have pre-made grey ink, but mix it from black and white.  For each of these pieces I had printed another black block first, and then added white ink without cleaning the plate and brayer in between.  As I printed each edition and added more and more white as I went along, the grey got lighter and lighter.  I found that I quite liked the very pale grey, like a mist (or perhaps a smog, but hopefully not!), but I also liked the variations.  You could try to make a matched set, or choose to pair different shades to keep things interesting.

     4. Everything’s better with dirigibles.  I knew right away I wanted the dirigible in the second city, partly to add a contrasting horizontal shape and partly to add a steampunk vibe, but also as evidence of inhabitants and movement.  When disembarking from the dirigible, you can slide down the long chute to the lower levels.  Or perhaps it’s got an escalator inside for those who like things a little more sedate, which would also make it possible to get up the same way.  But of course you can also use the elevator in the docking building.

        In a real city I’d definitely want trees, parks, and lots and lots of rooftop gardens, but these blocks were all about the straight lines and stark contrasts.  A major inspiration for the idea was an installation at the Tate Modern in London this summer “by” artist Olafur Eliasson, in which visitors were provided with 1000 kilograms of white Legos and invited to contribute whatever they wanted to the “Cubic Structural Evolution Project.”  Many of the elements listed above were present in this collaborative art project: huge variety of unrelated architectural styles, ad hoc connections between structures, and monochromatic palette.  But no dirigibles.

[Pictures: City I, rubber block  print by AEGN, 2019;

City II, rubber block  print by AEGN, 2019;

T at Olafur Eliasson’s Cubic Structural Evolution Project, photo by AEGN, 2019.]

J is for Jubjub Bird

        My theme for this year’s April A-Z Blog Challenge is fantastical creatures, celebrating my upcoming book, On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination, which will be released by the end of the year.  Please visit my Kickstarter Campaign for the project!

        The basics of the Jubjub bird, discovered by Lewis Carroll, are discussed in

the entire post about Mythical Creatures of the Letter J.

So today I’ll discuss how I designed my version.  One of the fun things about the Jubjub is that the description of it is quite vague and sparse, and since Sir John Tenniel never gave us his version to set the canon, it remains very much up to each artist to envision it as she wishes.  In the versions shared in the link above, one artist gives us a picture in which the Jubjub bird barely shows at all, so that it remains a mystery and we still don’t know how to imagine it.  The other gives it clothes, since Carroll says “Its taste in costume is entirely absurd - it is ages ahead of the fashion.”  I didn’t want to dress my Jubjub in clothes, so I contented myself with giving it gaudy plumage.  Almost the only other thing we learn about its appearance is that it has a “symmetrical shape,” which explains my composition.
We know it lives "in a perpetual passion," so I imagined it throwing a bit of a tantrum.  And finally, although Carroll’s description ends up sounding, on the whole, merely ridiculous, the one thing everybody does know for sure about the Jubjub is that we must beware it.  For this reason I gave it big, fierce talons like a velociraptor to hint that it really could be quite dangerous.  How do you imagine the Jubjub bird?

[Picture: Beware the Jubjub Bird!, rubber block print by AEGN, 2018.]

Working from Photographs (Part I)

        At my last show someone asked me, “I hope you won’t be offended, but do you ever work from photographs?”  The idea that I might be offended by the suggestion is sort of a funny one.  I consider working with the aid of photographs to be essential research into my subject.  Yes, I know that there has been a certain snobbery that a true artist needs no such aids.  That must be related to the idea that Renaissance artists were somehow “cheating” if they used a camera obscura, as if bringing some ingenuity to bear on a problem is genius, but bringing all your ingenuity makes it too easy or something.  But I never went to art school and was never trained to be a “true artist” anyway, so I’m going to set any judgments aside and simply describe some of the ways in which I do use photographs.

        First of all, whenever I’m planning to make a print of a real plant or animal, I gather lots of reference photos that show my subject from the angle I’m thinking of depicting it, as well as lots of other angles.  For example, if I’m doing a cat I might have photos to help with the pose, and photos for inspiration with the fur pattern, and photos to help with the face, and maybe additional photos for a detail of a paw or some other specific element about which I’m not quite sure.  I use photos of my own whenever possible, and I do use sketches from life when my own cat cooperates, but I supplement with a variety of photos from the internet to add to the research.  In these cases I’m not copying any single photo, but I’m certainly using the photographs to teach me details of what my subject looks like in real life.  Otherwise, how could I possibly know the proportions, or the way the joints bend in a particular position, or any of the other details I crave for accuracy?  Block printing often simplifies elements, but that makes it all the more vital that I start with the way things really look so that I can decide what to modify.  In this picture of a woodpecker, for example, I had some photos of birds on my feeder, but found additional photos that showed the bits that were obscured in my photos, as well as pictures of tree trunks with interesting bark.

        Even when I’m making a fantasy scene, I collect photos to help.  After all, nothing is really entirely new; it’s always composed of elements or analogies with real things.  I collect photos of trees for the forest setting, or lions’ paws for the feet, or birds’ or bats’ wings, or flames, and so on.  When I’m depicting a mythical creature with a long history, I do lots of research into how it’s been portrayed before, so that I can find the right balance between making my version “accurate” to its roots, and yet not too boringly generic.  How could I possibly know whether I was doing something new, if I didn’t know what had been done before?  Again, the idea is not to copy any one photograph exactly, but rather to use the photographs as research.  In the picture of the hercinia, for example, I looked at photos of birds to help get the flight right (I believe I ended up using pictures of terns for the basic shape), and lots of pictures of old growth European forests to get ideas for trees, mushrooms, fallen branches, and so on.  (Those pictures were mostly of the Schwartzwald in Germany and Bialowieza National Park in Poland.)  If you were to go searching on the internet for photographs of those forests you could probably recognize a tree here and a branch there, but you would not find any scene exactly like the forest through which my hercinia, which is not exactly a tern, flies.

        So that’s one way of using photographs, but perhaps that’s not what people are thinking of when they say “working from photographs.”  Tune in next post to find out about when I do, in fact, copy a photograph directly.

[Pictures: Downy Woodpecker, rubber block print with watercolor by AEGN, 2006 (sold out);

Feathers to Light the Way, rubber block print by AEGN, 2017 (sold out).]

Creature Collections: a Touch of Science

        Imaginary creatures aren't always pure fantasy.  Sometimes the imagination can be grounded in science to come up with some interesting new ways to think about the amazing possibilities of life.  Here are a few books and videos that do just that.

        Myths and Monsters: Secrets Revealed, by Katie Edwards, illustrated by Simon Mendez - Each mythical creature featured in this book is paired with a real animal that may have spawned or contributed to the myth.  The "realistic" illustrations of both imagined and actual creatures are colorful and quite beautiful.  T really liked the animal pairings, some of which were new and surprising to her. P also gave this book a thumbs-up.

        After Man, by Dougal Dixon - This book is written and illustrated in the style of an old-fashioned naturalist's notebook - picture Audubon, for example - but set on Earth 50 million years into the future when humans are gone from the scene and other animals have evolved in new and different directions.  Extensive notes explain the underpinnings of evolution with which Dixon worked, keeping all his fantastic creatures firmly founded on actual scientific principles.  (P liked the hornheads best.  I like the rabbucks - after all, they look a lot like my favorite llamas and vicunas.)

        Inspired by Dixon's book, there is a thirteen-part television documentary miniseries called The Future is Wild that imagines how life on Earth could evolve over 200 million years after the disappearance of humans.  Each 25-minute episode focuses on a particular ecosystem at a particular time period, and profiles a few species and their interrelations within that ecosystem.  It's based on science, but imagines entirely new creatures.  We enjoyed it a lot, although P tended to take it a little personally when some member of his favorite species came to an untimely end.  (And can I just say… octopuses taking the primates' place as most intelligent life on Earth is awesome!)

        Expedition, by Wayne D. Barlowe - Another naturalist's notebook, this time from an A.D.2358 expedition to a planet called Darwin IV.  Notable for making its alien species truly alien (no humanoids-with-funny-head-ridges here!), this book is a tour-de-force of imagination operating within the rules of science as we understand them.  But it's not particularly intended for children, and P and T found it much too dense to be enjoyable.  And I found that many of the creatures looked more like a Surrealist's nightmare than functioning life forms, which made it hard to get my head around.  (It just goes to show that when you want to tell a story sometimes it doesn't pay to get too creative!)

        However, inspired by Barlowe's book, there is a 94-minute television program called Alien Planet that shows a pair of robot probes exploring the life forms of Darwin IV.  Perhaps because it had to reach a more general audience, this version focusses on the more accessible of Barlowe's creations, and also has a plot of sorts, in the journey and challenges faced by the two probes.  P and T got quite attached to the probes as characters, but perhaps not so attached to the various hypothetical life forms.  Still, it's a neat way to get sci-fi with a solid grounding in the way real scientists think.

[Pictures: Reedstilt and pfrit; 

Wakka and strick, both illustrations by Dougal Dixon from After Man, 1981.]