ecology

Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 4

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I am so happy with how this overall project turned out! The tiles fought hard to keep their slick glass surfaces and people kept trying to persuade me to give up, but after a lot of failed attempts, I eventually prevailed in removing the top-most surface but leaving most of the glaze, crackle, and chip defects (and adding more defects of my own in the process).

From conception, I had planned on a nine-tile ceramic artwork and a five-tile-and-fragment ceramic artwork. One of the whole tiles ended up completely ruined while at the second sandblasting facility, so I was down to nine and four. I was initially pretty sure my nine-tile square artwork was going to be a tortoise, but I tried out a variety of compositions… and confirmed that a tortoise was my favorite option!

This project is exciting in that it is an experimental fusion between ceramics and painting, and it also uses as its substrate antique tiles from the 1840s. The multiple components means that I can display this piece in infinite ways; the “core composition” is of course the most resolved option but irregular spacing and/or scrambling encourages additional viewer appreciation for the artistry of each tile in its own right as well as introduces additional room for conceptual narratives around ecology, encroaching human environments into the natural world, negative space, abstraction, and time.

The subject is the larger, presumably male adult marginated tortoise I met on Mount Lycabettus - at least one group of locals call him Petros. When I was thinking about what to title this piece, I realized that marginated also means “marked or characterized by margins,” such that the word describes both the subject and substrate and therefore seemed to me to be the perfect title.

Marginated, acrylic on nine partially deglazed 19th century ceramic tiles, variable display dimensions with core dimensions of 16x16x.25", 2023.

Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of a marginated tortoise on nine partially deglazed 19th century tiles, displayed in the core dimensions.

Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of a marginated tortoise on nine partially deglazed 19th century tiles, displayed in a more conceptual, open configuration.

New Painting: Velocity

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Happy New Year! I’ve been hard at work painting a painted turtle; it was a beast to draw and quite demanding to paint as well because of all of the pattern and detail.

I met this baby painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) while biking the Adams Homestead and Nature Preserve - I felt very lucky to have spotted its dollar-coin-sized stature along the trail!

This is Velocity, acrylic on basswood panel, 14x14x1.5”, 2021.

BROTA and Buenos Aires Series "Transmigration Landscapes" Failed Tests

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I experimented with a number of different chromatography processes to learn which method would be conceptually and aesthetically strongest for my own practice. Two of the failed tests I did were interesting enough in their own right that I kept them, too, though as is evident they use a different technique that proved less effective at pigment differentiation than the process I used for the main Transmigration Landscapes.

These are, respectively, Failed Test 1 and Failed Test 3.

The Meaning of a Whole Ecosystem

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This well-written and devastating feature in The New York Times Magazine, “The Insect Apocalypse is Here,” is worth reading. You might cry, though.

In conversation, sometimes, a student will wish mosquitoes away. I tell them that mosquitoes are an important part of the food chain for a number of species, and that while I, too, would like to be mosquito-free, we must understand that we are one small part of a whole. We may soon manage to become the whole, though, through chipping and choking everything else out. This article is about the decline of all insects and the overall functional extinction of many species - and our often unnoticed acclimation to it all.

Yellowstone Bison Culling

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A great op-ed, "The Bison Roundup the Government Wants to Hide," was just published in The New York Times about the politically motivated annual bison cull that takes place in Yellowstone National Park at the taxpayer's expense.  I'm all for the suggestions of the author, Christopher Ketcham, with the clarification that I'd like any seasonal hunting to be restricted to that which encourages an ecological balance as opposed to one based on farm/ranch priorities, fear, or the desire for trophies.

Climate Science in the Public Eye

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I was sick recently, so I had the time to watch the television series Newsroom.  One clip really stuck with me:

Now given that this is from a fictional television series, viewers could be forgiven for thinking it an exaggeration.  But the facts check out, though sadly a few are outdated and have increased negatively in the meantime.

What really interests me apart from the immediate content is that the whole reason it's funny (admittedly in a macabre sense) is because most scientists are a little less depressingly stark about our situation.  Why is that?

It turns out that a recent paper "Duality in Climate Science" published in Nature Geoscience takes scientists and the media to task for underselling our ecological position due to fear of politically and professionally calamitous ramifications.  The paper summary reads:

Delivery of palatable 2 °C mitigation scenarios depends on speculative negative emissions or changing the past. Scientists must make their assumptions transparent and defensible, however politically uncomfortable the conclusions.  

What that's saying is that unless we can time travel backwards or develop technology in the future that we don't know exists yet, we're screwed.  Here's another not-at-all-comforting review of this and other papers saying in part, "The latest installment of depressing news is the delightful prediction that dozens of American cities are at risk of drowning before the century is out, turning places like New Orleans and Miami into the lost kingdom of Atlantis."

Carl Safina’s Beyond Words Is on My Reading List

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I've recently placed an interlibrary loan request for Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Dr. Carl Safina based on both the Jezebel interview and the New York Times review; I've always felt that while there may well be alien life in outer space, there's certainly alien life here.