Anatomy and Art

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of comments and messages on YouTube for my Sliding Filament animation.  Tonight I think I got the best one yet.  Thank you Chrissline77, whoever you are…

Thanks to Youtube and videos like this there is no way anyone should be failing biology, anatomy, or physiology in this day and age.

This video explained to me in 3 minutes what I had trouble understanding after reading a whole chapter.

And it wasn’t even painful.

Beautiful job whoever produced this.

So, some of you reading are no doubt familiar with Tumblr.  Others of you surely are not.  I’ve never signed up for the site myself, but as best as I can tell it’s some kind of a cross between Facebook and WordPress, allowing bloggers to link to each other, and a simplicity of image sharing.  Mostly I’ve only ever run into it myself when image collections pop up in my image searches, but I never quite realized that it was actually a community of people posting those images.  Well, quite recently my attention was drawn to a really amazing Tumblr of Scientific Illustration.  Naturally I had to post the link here.  This is a really great collection here!  I’m so impressed.

The actual Tumblr page looks like this, and you can poke through it for days and days looking at beautiful scientific illustrations…
http://scientificillustration.tumblr.com

Or you can view it, as I originally saw it, in it’s archive form, which will take you into the closer view of the site for any image you click on, with accompanying information about the image’s source and such…
http://scientificillustration.tumblr.com/archive

This one in particular caught my eye first.

Unfortunately I’m having a difficult time finding the illustrator for it, and the original post is in Italian.  It calls it La Straniera though, which according to Babblefish, means The Alien.  That may just be the person who posted it though.

Another Italian gem, this time with a much clearer artist’s attribute is that of Pietro Berrettini da Cortona via the National Library of Medicine‘s Dream Anatomy site.

Or this more colorful piece, right out of my present home city, Chicago.  If I’m catching the tiny printing right, this looked to be created all the way back in 1884 by L.W. Vaggy.

So yeah, the site leaves a bit to be desired in terms of credit to the artists.  But it is a fantastic collection of scientific illustration, and one that grows all the time.  I know I’ll be popping back in to check on it, and see what comes up next.

**edit – Please view the comments section for more artist information and links!**

Sometimes I do Google searches to see how this site pops up, and it always bothers me that searching for the words “anatomy and art” don’t necessarily bring up anatomyandart.com in a search.  So here I’m saying it within a post.  That’s right.  This post is a total cheat just to make Google look at me.  Or you could say I’m being helpful to people looking for the site here.  But apparently I have to say it.  I have to say anatomy and art. Did you get that Google?  Do you hear me now?  Anatomy and art, anatomy and art, anatomy and art!  And while I’m at it, anatomy art, art anatomy, anatomical art.  There.  Ha ha!  Take that searching algorithms!

Lately I’ve been seeing art pop up that paints real objects and real people as though they were painted or drawn.  I suppose the over all idea is something that I first saw when I went to a live performance of The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch.  The costumes and make-up were very much inspired by Dave McKean’s artwork for the original graphic novel.  Master of mixed-media that he is, he tends to combine photographs with drawings and well pretty much anything.  So when they did the play the, costumers chose to add a drawn or painted element to the actors on stage.

photo is from the LA Times

Well in the last week or so, I’ve seen that idea of painted life come up a couple more times.  And I have to say that the effect is stunning every time.

This video for “Forever Dolphin Love”, completely drew me in, and so much of it is specifically that aesthetic. Well that, and the fact that this guy’s just got such an amazing face to work with here.

Forever Dolphin Love – Connan Mockasin from daniel brereton on Vimeo.

Then just a few days ago, I found the work of Alexa Meade.

And how incredible is this?  She’s creating live paintings and then photographing them.  I’m sharing the links I’ve seen of hers directly here, because I think it’s just so much fun going through her work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexameade

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hyperrealistic-acrylic-body

All in all, it’s a style that really speaks to me. And I’m tempted to experiment with it a little myself. Maybe just once, I could paint the world, and my friends, and get to walk around in that reality, just for a little while. I don’t even know if I could pull it off, but I think I’d like to try sometime.

I know I haven’t written much this week.  Been reacclimating to Chicago, and fighting off a cold in the process.  But the cold is finally fading and it’s time to be sending off resumes far and wide to all those places that might have use for an anaplastologist just out of school.  I’m also finalizing the animation and finishing my research project paper for graduation this summer.

I’m attaching my resume here for download as a PDF.  It’s a shiny and new resume, and I’m rather fond of how it turned out.  It does have my current contact information, so here’s hoping that this isn’t a terrible idea to post here.  If ever there was a time to put it all out there, I suppose that now would be that time.

saraegner2011

So after making a sale so quickly on that last painting, I’ve been giving a little thought to the power of these here internets, and how I can use that connectivity to make more sales.  As it is, I went back to my primary website where I’ve been keeping a record of everything I’ve put to canvas since coming back to painting in 2001 – http://snapshotgenius.com/paint.  It’s not really set up for sales, but I have always kept a record there of which pieces have been sold or given to someone.  That information presents in the single image view for any piece.  I went back and specifically put the words “available for purchase” on all the other ones though, to make that clearer.  Ideally though, I’d like to come up with a site where anyone interested could just buy a piece right then and there, or at least contact me directly with ease about pricing.  I wrote up a few scribbles about how I might go about this yesterday while I was thinking about it.

That’s the basic layout I came up with.  The one drawback I guess is that I never get to show off any of the pieces I’ve done as gifts that way.  I’ve got a few that I’m pretty proud of that fall under that category.  I’ll have to think about that some more.

This is usually about the point that I shake my head a bit and think about how narcissistic this whole process is.  And that pretty much goes for art on the whole, not just promotion.  Sometimes I feel like a little kid clamoring for everyone to look at me, look at my picture.  But it’s what we do.

Unfortunately, I’m not that great at web design.  All those little colons and semi colons all having to be just so, well it’s not exactly a strength for me.  Even if I was better with basic design, I know it’s another step entirely when you start bringing credit card transactions into the picture.  People do it though.  Maybe someday it will be a worth while investment for me to get someone to put that together for me.  In the meantime, I’ll keep scribbling notes about such ideas down for later reference.

I really do have a special place in my heart for the XKCD webcomic.

And this one should be shared…

http://xkcd.com/896/

“Illumine”
Just finished today.
I’ll give her a coat of gloss when I get back to Chicago.

Now that the internship is done, it’s about time to head back North to Chicago.  There was something at the end of the week here that I wanted to stick around for, so I decided to take a few days to get my things in order, and take advantage of an empty house to work on my paper for graduation.  That was the plan anyways, but last night I fell into a painting, and well, it’s really coming along.

I always think it’s neat, the progression on these things.  So in case you think that sort of thing is neat too, here are a couple of cell phone shots.  The first is an early image followed by how far it had come by around 4am this morning, when I finally went to bed already.

I’m excited.  Despite the terrible distraction from my paper, I think this is going to be a nice piece.

And there you have it, the first of my anaplastology tools – one spatula, one #7, and one dappen dish for work with acrylic.  Last Friday marked my last day as an intern in Dallas.  As a parting gift I was given these tools, along with a couple other fun odds and ends.

My time with the Medical Arts Prosthetics Clinic has been really great.  I feel like I’ve learned so much.  And I got to work with a patient from their initial consultation on through the creation of a prosthesis, and onto delivery.  I had done all of those steps before, but never all towards one prosthesis, not from the point of an initial consultation anyways.  I got to do a lot of things with this internship, but seeing that patient through was really great.  And I know that this is what I want to do.

Here is a photo of the lot of us out at the clinic.  Listing left to right, that’s Greg Gion, Allison Vest, Colette Shrader, Sky Miranda, and me, Sara Egner.

And now it’s on to finishing up my project research, graduating, and making a career for myself.  Wish me luck!  Or better yet, send me job offers!  I’m about to be on the market!