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If I were a student right now, I think I’d have to pick data visualization as my major. Data visualization is the craft of presenting complex data in a comprehensible, visual format. Aaron Koblin’s work is both playful and stunning. (Check out The Johnny Cash Project for a hypnotic taste of a crowd-sourced animation.) Ben Fry’s static illustrations are also worth a peek as is Tableau Software, a data visualization tool for businesses.

If you’ve got any good data viz links up your sleeve, send them my way! I cannot get enough of this stuff.

Strawberries picked by someone I love.

It’s that poignant time of year.

I went to WordCamp the WordPress conference on Saturday. WordPress powers this blog. Though blogging and technology are slightly off topic for me, I thought some of you might find some of this stuff interesting.

COPYRIGHT NORMS ARE CHANGING
WordCamp panelist Dave Taylor claims ownership of all comments folks leave on his blog. Here’s the text he posts on his site.

“Please note that by submitting a question or comment you’re agreeing to my terms of service, which are: you relinquish any subsequent rights of ownership to your material by submitting it on this site.”

He is taking his lead from FaceBook, the behemoth that claims ownership of all the content people upload to its network. Yes, he says he’s consulted with a lawyer. I think he’s being bold and that this is a fluid, potentially contentious area. It’ll be interesting to see how this stuff pans out, especially if he ever pens (or edits, I should say) a book based on his blog.

DESIGNERS KNOW WHERE IT’S AT
The folks who sat on the Design Panel – Jim Turner, Kevin Conboy and Kevin Menzie – recommended the following sites for when you’re in the need of a hit of visual inspiration. Dribbble, CSSRemix and ZooTool.

COMMENTS DESERVE MODERATION
The first session I attended, Creating a Blog Community, evolved (or devolved depending on your point of view) into a discussion on comment moderation. Most panelists seemed in favor of comment moderation. Fortunately, this blog doesn’t require much moderation (all you who comment here are kind). But if it did, I’d do so without hesitating. I believe it’s up to a blog’s author to set its tone. So does Doyle Albee whose rant about the comments area of my local paper’s website is worth a read.

Thanks to my friend Susan J. Thompson for reminding me of these wax and pollen works works by Wolfgang Laib.

Pollen from Dandelion by Wolfgang Laib, 1999

Untitled by Wolfgang Laib, beeswax, 1993

The Five Mountains Not To Climb On by Wolfgang Laib, 1984

Those yellows are something special, don’t you think?

Here’s another gem gleaned from the Daily Dish. It’s an animated illustration of the golden ratio or golden mean by Cristóbal Vila. Nature, art and math enmeshed.

Here’s a nice article about roundness inspired by this Kandinsky painting.

Several Circles by Vasily Kandinsky, 1926

‘The circle, he (Kandinsky) wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.”

Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.’

- Natalie Angier for the NYTimes

A year ago I took a wonderful class, Jungian Concepts Illustrated by Animals in Fairy Tales. As part of the introduction each person was invited to say which animal “brought” him or her to class. I picked the fox. Foxes are common here in Boulder, Colorado but I still get a hit of excitement every time I see one (like the time this summer when I woke up before dawn and found one the garden nosing around the bees).

Neighborhood fox sunning itself in backyard, November 2009

Speaking of foxes, there are two films you need see if you’re as into foxy beauty as I am. They’re both about the yearning/harrowing relationships we humans have with wild things.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, out in theaters now, is a masterpiece. Seriously. More than any other recent film, it made me itch for the resources only Hollywood can bestow. Gorgeous, funny, tender and sweet.

The Fox and the Child, also wonderful, is a nature film hung on a narrative about a woodland girl’s friendship with the neighborhood fox which she tries to tame. Frightening, but beautiful, too.

Neighborhood fox in full yawn, November 2009

According to the Animals in Fairy Tales instructors, each person’s chosen animal represented how he or she wished to be seen. (Uh oh.) I love how in Jungian thought symbols, especially animals, are rich with meaning. Great for dreaming… and painting.

Something warming from the NYTimes, a slide show about a woman who likes to walk.

P.S. I know I’ve been a delinquent blogger lately. It’s been a hectic couple of months. I have missed you.

New puppy!

More pics here.

Breathtaking, eh? More here.

Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302

“What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes!”

The Drive Home, encaustic and ink on panel, 10′ x 8″

The painting above was inspired, in part, by salad burnet.

Burnet stem and leaves

Burnet is a cucumber scented salad herb. Like many herbs, it’s a vigorous grower but wilts quickly when picked. Its leaves are soft and flimsy and it has beautiful curving stems. Though I don’t often use serrated leaves in painting (too zig zaggy) I’m happy to make an exception for burnet leaves. They remind me of an animal’s hands, and when painted brown, they remind me of oak. Either way, they charm me. I hope you like them, too.

Strangely, the lines I get when I draw from the real offer more surprises than those that spring from my imagination alone. All my current work is inspired by plants. I don’t aim to copy them, but use them as a way to ground my hand.

The Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Loveland Museum is gorgeous.

Wayne Thiebaud, “Bakery Case,” 1996

I went for the cakes (there’s something deliciously subversive about all that sugar) but ended up falling for his newer work – vertiginous, playful landscapes – a few of which are on view in this nice slideshow by the Sacramento Bee.

Of course, Thiebaud’s paintings are right and wonderful as they are, but I can’t help wondering how even MORE wonderful they’d be if they’d been rendered in wax. Thiebaud has a fantastic brushstroke that’s both indulgent and restrained. it’s hard to see in reproduction, but he makes these careful linear strokes and then mars them with goopy flourishes. It’s a sensual technique that seems ready-made for encaustic.

I’m a sucker for museum gift stores and picked up this sweet little book Counting with Wayne Thiebaud when I was there. Its cropped reproductions show Thiebaud’s brushstrokes fairly well.

It’s nice to know that, at 88, some people still paint like rock stars.

Ladybugs!

Ladybug gathering 7/18/09

While it’s normal to find insects, including clusters of ladybugs, at the top of Green Mountain in Boulder, Colorado it’s NOT normal to find so many.

Ladybug Tree

This singular tree, just south of the summit marker, was covered from tip to toe when I hiked up to check them out last Saturday. Entomologists are citing rain as the responsible party for this so-abundant-it-seems-magical event.

Holding Ladybugs

Unexpected gifts like this make life seem wonderful.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary is another great summer read for artists. It tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Renee Michel, a 54 year old concierge who lives and works at a luxury Parisian apartment building, Paloma, the suicidal pre-teen intellectual who lives upstairs and their mutual fascination with the building’s new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, a Japanese film director.

It’s about the power of art to save lives, to make life bearable. I LOVED it, read it a few months ago and am still thinking about it today.

An excerpt:

My name is Renée. I am fifty-four years old. For twenty-seven years I have been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments, all of which are inhabited, all of which are immense. I am a widow, I am short, ugly, and plump, I have bunions on my feet and, if I am to credit certain early mornings of selfinflicted disgust, the breath of a mammoth. I did not go to college, I have always been poor, discreet, and insignificant. I live alone with my cat, a big lazy tom who has no distinguishing features other than the fact that his paws smell bad when he is annoyed. Neither he nor I make any effort to take part in the social doings of our respective kindred species. Because I am rarely friendly — though always polite — I am not liked, but am

tolerated nonetheless…

Oh, man. I inhaled The American Painter Emma Dial this weekend. It’s a fantastic novel about a NYC artist’s assistant who paints the paintings dictated by her famous boss. It’s the best, most real depiction of painting I’ve had the pleasure of reading or seeing on film and it’s deliciously quotable, too…

There is nothing sexier than a well-drawn line…

I was trying to build my world around being a painter. I worked tirelessly, fantasizing about the picture I was making. all the pictures to come, and what it would be like when they took on another life out in the world, apart from me. I never doubted that painting was my future…

When we got stir-crazy we went to the bar. Irene and I spoke contemptuously of some of the bar’s denizens who wore painter’s clothes and had not made a thing in years, or the ones who hid out in graduate school rather than face the difficulty of earning a living and figuring out hot to build a life as an artist. There used to be loads of people like us around, young and old, artists working without much thought for the business side or the academic side… But I did not know them anymore and I felt, thinking of Michael’s studio where I painted five days a week, that I was missing out…

Cannot think of a better summer read for an artist.