Art Monday: sketch for Art Evolved Gallery

Just a quick Art Monday while I try to give myself a crash course in ArtRage.

Over at Art Evolved, the next group paleo gallery (tomorrow! yipes!) is about Anomalocaris. For a long while now I've had an idea to do a series of Precambrian-inspired clothing.
Anomalocaris is supposed to be (in my mind) similar to the whole preying mantis/black widow/femme fatale aesthetic.

This was the original, unfinished painting from a couple of years ago: And here's my new sketch: I had a model pose for the shoulders. Apparently, that is quite an uncomfortable combination of hip and neck tilts. Instead of being underwater as in the original, I decided to make her emerging from it.

Off to try ArtRage!
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Foundation Beyond Belief

Foundation Beyond Belief is a new secular humanist charitable organization in progress, largely founded by Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers author Dale McGowan. Dale also blogs at The Meming of Life which has an astoundingly good banner...oops, off-topic.)



Parenting Beyond Belief is an astoundingly useful freethought book, not just for breeders or breeders-to-be, but for any atheist or humanist who looks for a few sign posts on how to live in an (almost) overwhelmingly religious world.

(From their Facebook Causes page) The Foundation Beyond Belief is meant:
1. To focus, encourage, and demonstrate humanist generosity
2. To support the next phase in humanist parent education

To quote Dale, "We’re making no little plans here, and there’s the potential to do something pretty earthshaking. But this is a community thing, or it’s nothing. We’ll need your help."

The fledgling Foundation is in its last few hours of an initial and modest pledge drive: do what I did. Donate what you can. Join the Facebook Causes group, or sign up for email updates.

Atheists, humanists and freethinkers have charity in us too. You know you wanna!

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Meeting Bloggers: Blue Future

The list of bloggers I'd love to meet is long, but the list of them who I feel like I've already met is pretty short.

Leading the pack in so many ways is Mike Haubrich of Tangled Up In Blue Guy.

Mike has continually written insightful posts on such a wide range of topics, he's easy to get to know. His intellectual understanding of the angst and weariness atheists often feel does not stop him from standing firm against the tide of religion-state trends harrowing the U.S. Just read the gentlemanly (and I say as a compliment, typical) atheistic way Mike dealt with Ramadan and DQ Frozen Cake. He doesn't scream and froth, he elucidates.

Mike has also habitually been a big booster of my artwork, not only on his blog and mine, but others as well. If it wasn't for Mike, Dan and I might have remained in broken-email-limbo instead of making the Migrations banner, which I like to think turned out fantastically well. I've taken inspiration from his support and friendship on more than one occasion. And if I think back, Mike is one of the people who first got me thinking about the wild and wonderful Beagle Project. Over Facebook, Mike has introduced me to interesting people such as Stephanie Svan. When I was at Science Online '09, it almost felt like he was there.

When I think about blogging, I think about Tangled Up In Blue Guy. Happy Birthday, Mike! One day, let's stand on the deck of the Beagle together and have a cup of joe.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Airing out

Let me begin by saying that I have always known that by publicly stating I am an atheist, a secular humanist, (I've described myself as a Bright in the past as well) I may lock myself out of some art & illustration jobs. There's an excellent xkcd cartoon about this, my very favourite. I know some people may not feel comfortable hiring an atheist who loves evolution to paint for them. Like many artists, I have my areas of interest and my specific abilities, and it's not going to suit everyone.

However, in some recent posts about a popular contest here on The Flying Trilobite, a young person spouted a series of lies about me. I responded, they backed down and deleted their long comment. I re-posted it for a couple of days, not appreciating the hit-and-run.

I then rationalized, perhaps I will remove the comments, and try to engage this person in dialogue via email. (Which I may no longer do. I will think about it.)

I've changed my mind again. You see, I don't like to think of myself as an aggressive and insulting atheist, though I believe for things to change, some ridicule of some beliefs is likely to help some of the time, just as conciliatory and across-the-table discussions will help some of the time.

I am going to re-post the exchange, to air things out on this blog. My contest was very very popular, I am happy to note, and now I am concerned that the higher-than-normal readership may have the wrong impression due to a single commenter's lying remarks. I've had a couple of responses from professional correspondents now who think I have called religious people "idiots" or "insane". I believe it is likely that in reading this person's comments, people have the wrong impression of me.

I always knew I may miss some art jobs and experiences based on my beliefs but I don't want to miss some based on lies about my beliefs and statements.

Comments are in chronological order below. I am only re-posting things that were originally publicly available on this blog, and not private exchanges. I am removing the commenter's name since to me they appear conflicted about science religion, and though they go off on these rants on a number of blogs, I believe they truly do love paleontology. I'll refer to the commenter as "MC" for "misguided commenter". Edited only for the amount of spaces between paragraphs, and the person's name.
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-The original post showing a painting and it's explanation is here.

-Keep in mind I don't specifically mention "religious people" and instead present the painting as an homage to atheist bloggers I admire, and mention how painting themes of an atheistic nature is difficult for me since I don't want to be overly mocking.

-MC comment #1:
I agree with you that religion is dangerous and Most "Christians" take it TOO far, though I have to speak from an Darwinist Christian much like Paleontologist Robert T. Bakker. I do NOT agree that it should be taken out completely, though, let me set this straight. I may be a Christian, but I am NOT religious!! I do NOT do the whole Zippity-doo-da and become an @$$ to others!! I live the Zen and by Reason and Science! We ARE having that problem in U.S. and we may have to do that, though technically we can't because of our First Amendment in our Bill of Rights. Basically, any, and all attempts to do so are Unconstitutional. We COULD Amend it, though I think that it NOT everybody, even, Democrats would agree that it would be the best option. Doing so may start another Civil War, sadly.

Anywho, I'm afraid that cutting out religion just isn't fair, as it's NOT everybody who does this. I feel the same way you do, but calling their belief in a God and Jesus insane, not only insults them, but me as well.

I think I am hurt by your suggestion that you sterotype people like me and Dr. Robert T. Bakker like that.

Don't get me wrong, I KNOW and AGREE of the dangers of religion, but simply persecuting and insulting their beliefs is the same thing they do.

There, simply, must be another way.

I'm sorry to say, Glendon, I respect and agree with Richard Dawkins from a scientific standpoint, but his insults about MOST Christian people that ARE good and Open-Minded, just hurts me that someone like him stereotypes religious groups because he is Aetheist. I may NOT always agree with him, but I still respect his opinions and yours.

Please, forgive my rant. :P

-My response:
Hi (MC),

I must admit I think if anyone should feel insulted it might be me after the accusations you have thrown my way. However, I'll give you some benefit of doubt, and make myself clear.

(Please feel free to correct me if I am misrepresenting my views from an earlier post.)

Bakker's book The Dinosaur Heresies is one of my all-time faves. Exploding dogmatic ideas and amazing art. That doesn't mean I need to agree with him on everything though, or with you on everything.

What exactly do you think I am saying your country's constitution should be changed to? I don't recall making any such assertions. I'm Canadian by the way.

I also haven't advocated persecuting anyone for their beliefs.

I don't specifically recall tweeting, blogging, IM-ing the moment where I said "belief in God or Jesus is insane" as you are saying I did.

I do think I have the right to call a belief of any kind an insulting name, or give it a compliment as I wish. One of my favourite things about Canada and the 'States is freedom of speech. I like to think I am measured in my responses, though I can't please everyone.

As for your opinion of Dawkins, my best response to read some of his work.

*sigh* If putting up a painting with chess pieces to describe my feelings about science and religion is going to lead to this many misunderstandings in a single comment of yours, please feel free not to come back to my blog (MC). You and I have now cluttered up enough contest entry space with this. Done.

-MC's response:
You're right, Glendon. ;( I'm sorry! It's just a sensitive topic for me and I will delete my response promptly. :( Dude, please forgive me.
(response deleted by commenter)

-My next response:
I don't appreciate the hit-and-run. I received your two apologies, but I am copy-&-pasting your original comment that you deleted.

Accusing me of saying things I never said doesn't get you off the hook just because of a simple "sorry" and deletion. Disagreeing with me is fine, though I will debate and argue back. If you really want to apologize, do it with your actions and stop throwing wrongful accusations around in the future.

Your words from the deleted comment above, minus some of the large spaces between paragraphs:
(I then re-posted MC's original comment from above.)

-After a couple of days, I deleted all the comments from this exchange.

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I'm not sure where to go with this next. I'm upset that my professional reputation could possibly be injured by a drive-by set of ridiculous comments about things I never said. What is likely, is that I will erase the comments from MC in the future as soon as they come. I'm not about to institute moderation for everyone for one person.

I hope the words above will clear the air somewhat, and that the painting can be seen as hardly provocative of the comments this person threw at it.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Contest winner!

Winner of my first contest:

Coturnix!

Bora, you will receive a signed print of Science-Chess Accomodating Religion some time in the next few weeks.

Holy Monkey that was close.

I had to call in a second judge to weigh in accuracy factors and the timing of entries. I've also already, (appropriately, I think) tweeted the winning announcement.

Here are my original ideas, and a breakdown of how Coturnix won the print:
Pieces in the back, left to right:
-Darwin's tree of life drawing
-Wave-particle duality
-Kekule's dream of an ourobouros representing the benzene ring
-Mendel's peas
-Copernican heliocentrism
-Red bishop as religion, transparent, cracked, alone and with a halo, the halo being a symbol that most religions incorporate into their visual iconography
Toppled in the foreground, left to right:
-Stem cells
-Needle representing vaccines

But dude, this was close.

Basically, by mine and my second judge's tally, Scicurious actually had all of the correct answers - but the last after contest closing at noon today. Sorry Sci! I had to draw a line.

The piece representing wave-particle duality was the toughie - some of the answers had me scurrying to look up science concepts or history I was unaware of! Anonymous-Trish had it almost bang-on, but if I am looking at the difference between Coturnix's "radioactivity" answer and Anon-Trish & James' "Curie's theory of radioactive decay and using it for carbon dating", I chose the earlier answer.

Thanks to everyone who played along - this was fun. And I like Bora's suggestion to see this on a t-shirt. And I think I need to send Greg Laden a Mr. Bill made out of plasticine.

Thanks everyone!
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

"Science-Chess Accommodating Religion"...contest!

"I'm thinking scientific accommodation of religion is akin to letting someone take your King's Rook off the board because you're winning."

This painting was originally created due to the above Twitter tweet I made, inspired by the writing of Jerry Coyne, Ophelia Benson, PZ Myers, Mike Haubrich, Stephanie Zvan, Greg Laden, Jason Thibeault, Russell Blackford and Richard Dawkins. This painting is an homage to your writing, and the other atheists out there unafraid to speak up (I am sure I have left many out). Mike liked it enough to add it to his rotating quotes, and that got me thinking about how I would visualize it.

Since I began blogging my art, I have struggled with themes of secularism and atheism without being cartoonish or overly mocking. Science and my surreal riffs are fun and fascinating for me, but atheist painting concepts have been a challenge.

The contest: identify all the pieces. I will give the first person to figure them all out a signed print from my reproduction store. Blog comments here at this Flying Trilobite post only to qualify (not Twitter or Facebook at this time, please, it will be hard to see who was first). A higher quality view of the image can be seen in my Reproduction Shop.

Let's say...in order of left to right, with the two toppled pieces in the foreground following the red piece in sequence? I will be away for my usual Art Monday, so let's leave this contest in its stead.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Fanboy Monday: Capturing Man-Thing!

Lately I've been filling my sketchbook with some of my favourite characters from various pop culture franchises in a very fanboy-ish manner. So for the month of August, expect each Art Monday to feature something fun and different from usual Flying Trilobite fare.

Created for Marvel by Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas and artist Gray Morrow (who has an awesome name), Man-Thing is a swamp creature that is arguably representative 1970's comic world's fascination with monsters. A living mass of swamp matter who burns evildoers with an acidic touch, Man-Thing was scientist Ted Sallis who has lost his humanity and mind. Steve Gerber is generally credited with doing the seminal Man-Thing storyline, though I was a big fan of the art and writing in the 1997 series by J.M. DeMatteis and artist Liam Sharp.

Despite the science-y beginnings, Man-Thing is often used as a more or less supernatural guardian of realities, and changes form in his travels out of the swamp. He meets tons of mainstream Marvel characters, from Spider-Man to the Thing to Howard the Duck.

I know there are a lot of comparisons with DC's Swamp Thing, but I love this character's look. The weird facial tendrils give him both the look of a being of vines and an elephant. In this drawing, I thought I would have Man-Thing being captured by some sort of quartz, and being frozen to the ground. I also gave him a big belly, and little "eyelashes" similar to the sweet-scented drops on a carnivorous sundew plant.

Colour? I'm not sure...

Next week: ??

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Man-Thing is copyright and trademark to Marvel Comics.
This is a fan homage, not a licensed illustration. Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Creative Spaces - Closet Creativity

Artist-writer-oaf Sean Craven of Renaissance Oaf and I have talked about how fascinating it is to peek inside another creative person's studio space. To quote Sean, "I'm always fascinated by the workspaces of creative types. The factories of the culture industry, the monastic hives of the culturally isolated, closets and couches as well as studios or arts centers."

Sean has started things off with Ascending the Lavender Staircase his Workstation and Decor by Default. So let's whisk into the wall of my living room.

My baseball-playing, special education teaching, gorgeous wife Michelle and I live in an ancient 3 story apartment just west of downtown where Littles Italy, Portugual and Brazil meet. It's a two-bedroom, and because our nephew stays over once a week, a few years ago we gave him the second bedroom as his own. Michelle's office moved to the living room. I offered to take one of our two huge living room closets. I didn't want the little guy messing with my painty chemicals.

So let's pull one book out on the shelf and whisk into the wall of my living room. My studio is a closet, painted to look like part of the wall. I don't have a lot of photos of the outside of the studio. Here's one from a couple of year's back. It's behind my holiday smile. Weird colours in that photo. The walls are actually more neutral blue-green.

This is just inside. You can see I have pieces of the Of Two Minds and Meming of Life banners tacked to the door. I also sometimes pour stand oil, a thick-as-honey heated linseed oil on top of my finished paintings, like the diatom fairy painting in the foreground. Gives it a mottled, glossy surface.

The view above my card table/drawing surface. Some pieces from the Migrations banner, and a large drawing about my asthma and lungs in general I did years ago.
Almost every surface of the studio is crammed with my images. I find it helps me to recall brushtrokes or colours I may presently be having trouble with. One of my only non-mybigego images is an article entitled "Evolution, and nothing more" by Jerry Coyne, published in Canada's National Post on Friday 2nd of December, 2005. It was a one page rebuttal to the previous day's insipid "intelligent design" article. It was the first time I had ever read Jerry Coyne, and it electrified me. I was drawing and talking about it like crazy. So now it's plaque-mounted and been in my studio space ever since.
Paintings, collapsible easel, buncha portfolios. Naked humans with mitochondria and trilobites.
They say the trick to taking pictures of oil paints is to use 2 bright bulbs at 45 degree angles or less and very distant from the painting. I paint in a closet. Meh.
My original painting-drawing for the current blog banner actually just moves awkwardly around the studio (below on my paint-box). The drawing is lined up on a piece of bristol that I carelessly got squidges of paint on. I really need to get that framed properly. Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle is under glass in a hinged 12x12 scrapbooking frame.

The wooden flying trilobite necklace Tanja Sova made and gave me is hanging below. Our home has books in almost every room. Like Bond, I like to have some inspiration and reference close at hand. The bright blue book below the awesome Art S. Buck mannequins and Precambrian toys is my mother's original nursing anatomy book. Books on concept art, atheism, science and art techniques all sit hand in hand on there. And Twisted Toyfare Theatre tends to creep in sometimes.
Paint! I use such thin layers when I paint, many of those tubes are from when I originally worked on my undergrad 12 years ago. I think I have only replaced the lamp black, titanium white and naples yellow. More storage portfolios, one with another diatom fairy from the period when all my people had green skin.
If studio spaces are like a room into the mind of the artist, mine is fit to burst. Or collapse inward and make a crushing singularity.
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This trip into Creative Spaces wouldn't be half as fun if it wasn't continued by others. Some Creative Spaces I'd love to see: Almost Diamonds, eTrilobite, The Day After, Heather Ward Wildlife Art, Claudia Massie and State of the Art. If you participate, feel free to use Sean's excellent logo above! We plan on collecting all the links in a post on Art Evolved.
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Other Creative Spaces so far:
*Renaissance Oaf, Parts one, two, three.
*Bond's Blog

- - - - - - - - Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence. Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Bring Bing Back!

We gotta bring Bing home.

Bing left home and has sent amazing photos back from across the Pacific. Some with little robots. I know that piqued your interest. Little robots! The photography is all that and a bag of squid-ink chips. (Except for that one where he has a giant Buddha stuck to his head. That's just weird.)

The Son of a Blue Guy is in Japan, and needs to get back to Minnesota. His new friends in Japan want to keep him there. In fact, they have threatened to hold him for ransom unless his North American friends and family do two things:

1. Answer questions about Japan/Nippon culture and cuisine.
2. Donate money to help his mother pay the plane fare for his trip.

It's tempting for a young man to stay in Japan, because so far he has found the food to be awesome and the shopping (even in vending machines) to be, let's say, "unique." In fact, the Japanese students think that if he stays long enough he could use his ninja powers to be Emperor someday. I don't think that this would be a good thing for world peace, as Bing has not worked out his "Megalomania" issues and bad things could happen. So I've heard. The robots are in the photo for a reason after all.

The question The Flying Trilobite has been assigned to help Bing is:
The name “Japan” is an exonym. Exonyms are place-names not used in the native language nor by the native people. The endonyms for Japan are “Nippon” (formal) or “Nihon” (informal.) The origin of the word “Japan” is traced back to Portuguese sailors who adapted it from the language of:

a. Vietnam
b. Korea
c. Malaysia
d. Hawai'i

Click! Donate some cha-ching to bring Bing back! (A part of me wants him to bring giant conquering Gundams with nunchuk skills.)

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***