Skip to main content

Ginko Attempt

In Damascus, Virginia, near access to the Virginia Creeper trail, is a bed and breakfast known as the Millsap-Baker Estate. The house is more of a museum than a place of lodging. Each room brims with old pipes and depression glass. The breakfast area resembles something from Harry Potter, and the host and hostess tell stories every morning over home-cooked breakfast with 4 kinds of jam. Outside of the Victorian ediface of the Millsap-Baker Estate is a large Ginko tree surrounded in a halo of yellow confetti leaves, perfectly shaped like wings. I printed my Ginko leaf in red because yellow does not contrast enough with paper, though it is a mixed red. In this color, it more resembles a Japanese fan of some kind. The shape took me so thoroughly that I carved it into a woodblock and attempted to make cards from it. I'm still learning to manage this level of detail.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LD3: Neutral Coloration

My third illustration for Lucy's Dance treats the delicate topic of the missionaries who visited Stebbins in the late 1920's and stopped the Curukaq festival . . . or rather, tamed it into hiatus. A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Martin Lonneaux, overlooking the support-system of the Yup'ik community, perceived that the gift-giving portion of the festival was costly enough that it left several Yup'ik families destitute. Lonneaux concocted a watered-down version of the potlatch that would involve smaller, church-supplied gifts, but in the process amputated the festive spirit of the festival such that his "pretend kassiyuq " never caught on. For further details, see Stebbins Dance Festival (xxiv). The wording in Lucy's Dance focuses neutrally on the cultural misunderstanding. It would have been easy to use powerfully-charged language when summarizing this cultural loss. From what little I can find about him, Fr. Lonneaux, SJ seems to have been a relatively toler...
5 comments
Read more

Artifact Studies and Random Notes

In junior high school I collaborated on a project with a small, mostly-female group of students. We were to design a unique, fictional culture and build illustrative cultural artifacts. We would bury said artifacts in a cardboard box filled with soil. Another team would then excavate our artifacts and guess about our culture. After several days of creative deliberation, we designed a pyramid-based matriarchy wherein men were kept underground as slaves, brought out occasionally to build more pyramids. Elvis was God. According to the artifact of my memory, middle school was a confused and hostile culture. I began this week's illustrations, again, with visual research. I still don't know everything about these artifacts, but my Stebbins Dance Festival book has some interesting statements about them. Part of what I do know I impart below. According to their cultural artifacts, the Yup'ik people practice artful dancing to drums while waving furred objects. They also spend time ...
7 comments
Read more

Argument from Final Consequences, feat. Jack White

In the SG definition, "Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves." As the White Stripes put it in their song, " Effect and Cause ": "first comes an action, and then a reaction, which you can't switch around for your own satisfaction." Another fitting example from the song: "if you're headed for the grave, don't blame the hearse." I've decided to be a bit abstract in my interpretation of the fallacy. Normally, the negative space , or the space around the snail shape, is an effect of the snail. In this drawing, I have shifted the negative space to the foreground, allowing it to cause a shadow. I have effectively cut out the negative space and placed in front of a telescope. The fallacy is sometimes called the "teleological" (end/purpose) fallacy because it makes effects, o...
3 comments
Read more