Anatomy and Art

It’s been about five months now, since I last owned my SLR still cameras.  It was about the end of February when my house was burglarized and both my Pentax K1000 and Canon 20D were stolen right in the camera bags I kept them in with all accompanying lenses and general accessories (filters, extra batteries for the digital camera, extra film for the film camera).  And it’s been weird.  I’m so used to having them.  I didn’t use the Pentax often anymore, but I learned on that camera and I’ve always appreciated knowing that I could when worthy situations or ideas arise.  And the Canon, well that’s the camera that finally sold me on the capability of digital photography.  At first I was very careful with it.  Then I started taking that camera all over, even to Burning Man.  I’ve worked and played with that camera.  But most of all, it’s just been there so long.  Part of why I haven’t replaced it yet is that the way USAA’s home insurance works is that the longer you’ve had a thing, the less they actually give you for it until you’ve replaced it.  So having a house full of goods to try and replace, and a whole lot of hassle with faxing receipts and endless phone tag after every purchase to get the rest of my reimbursement, it made financial sense to do things in a certain order, so as not to be out so much all at once.  My cameras are by far the most expensive thing taken from my house.  Well, technically my burglars came back and stole my car about a month later, but if we’re specifying *inside* the house, then it was the cameras.  I did get that car back, for the record.

Anyway, here I am, roughly five months later, about ready to finally replace my digital camera and lenses.  I’m probably going to go Canon again, though having a clean wipe on past equipment like this does make one think about the potential for starting fresh in another line entirely.  Sony is apparently getting into the camera game and pulling some professional photographers over to that side.  Nikon has always been a strong contender, and I believe that they are still the only company to make flat lenses, which could be helpful for shooting paintings or if I ever got a set up to shoot slides with a microscope.  But the main contender just now is the Canon 70D.  It seems the most similar to what I had, with some nice boosts to performance.  Then again, with as often as I find myself shooting in low light, I might do well to pick up something with a full frame sensor.  If I’m sticking with Canon, that would probably be the 6D which is more expensive, but certainly more affordable than Nikon’s D4.

One thing that I’m noticing in all of these new camera models is that they’re all trying to offer wireless connectivity now and synching with your smart phone, which while I like the idea of a remote, I always kind of appreciated that my real cameras didn’t upload to Facebook at a whim’s notice.  Sometimes the idea is to do it right and go through your images later, tweaking where necessary and only publish what still feels right the next day.  I dunno.  It’s not like they make you use that stuff, but it does seem a little excessive, and potentially like killer of battery life, which I do care very much about.

Anyways, I’ll have to pick something soon.  I am feeling myself done with my time away from camera ownership, and I want back in to what really is one of my primary art forms.  And really, I’ve been overcompensating with my iPhone in the interim.  And on that note I leave you with just such an iPhone photo of my and my little dog, because I just keep taking these, and because I caught a cute one.  Actually the iPhone really does have an impressive camera for what it is.  And it’s been nice exploring that.  But give me back my lenses!

A couple years ago, I painted this on a carefully selected canvas that I bought at Hobby Lobby.  At the time, I felt like a jerk for ever feeling suspicious that a Christian affiliated company might be more inclined to support unethical causes.  But I didn’t want any bad juju in my art, so I looked them up online and found out a little about what kinds of charitable donations they were making.  And I remember being relieved.  Having grown up in Texas, I’d seen some businesses that seemed nice turn out to be giving money to causes that I find abhorrent and those choices were always explained as being based in Christianity.  Now when I left Texas for a little over a decade, I found such impressions softened. Conversations about religion didn’t feel so political and even highly devout Christian friends just never felt like they were attacking for their beliefs.  They were just their beliefs.  And removed from the pressures of the bible belt they were often beautiful to hear about.  When I returned to Texas, I noticed that controversial nature of religion rising again.  When people were bussed in to the capitol to protest women’s access to abortion in this state, I saw that ugly threatening side of religion all over again.  And now, here’s this business that maybe leans a little heavily on cheap Chinese manufacturing, but across the board seemed to be pretty ethical and even really nice.  They put money into things like building houses for the poor.  And I bought this canvas there.  And I made this art that is largely a celebration of femininity and womanhood.  And then Obamacare goes through and Hobby Lobby becomes the poster child for businesses that want to claim a religious right to deny women their full health care coverage and yet not pay the taxes for not providing full benefits.  And then yesterday that actually passes in the Supreme Court.  And so this company, that was at one time kind of a symbol to me of religious influence in a corporation being just fine, and even doing good in the world, like the way I thought it was supposed to work when I was a kid, wages war against equal compensation for women for the work that they do.  And it does so at the level of health care, which just makes the attack feel so much more personal.  I am so very disappointed by my government for the decision made by the Supreme Court yesterday, but I am also disappointed in Hobby Lobby itself.  I grew up believing that it was wrong to succumb to prejudice about others’ religion.  But in this time of holy wars and tea party/ republican invasion I can’t help wondering if it’s even possible not to take on such prejudice.  Such walls don’t seem like the answer.  And yet, as a woman of today, I can’t help but feel under attack.  Being back in Texas no doubt exacerbates this feeling.  And tonight I find myself looking at this painting that I still have and thinking about the relationships between being, and politics, and religion, and money, and art.  My very existence as a woman in this world is somehow controversial in ways, and that’s not new, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.  I also don’t see it being exclusive to women.  We just happen to be particularly under the political spotlight just now.  I guess such experiences are why we have so many conversations about privilege.

Anyway, I realize that this is a bit of a controversial topic to come back on after some down time not posting.  It’s been a hectic couple of months filled with crime, and death, and bureaucracy, and just lately camping, and catching up socially, and I suppose this week involves an introspective political rage.  I suppose I’m not far off from where I was last year, coming up on another 4th of July in just the days after watching my supposed political representatives fight to make women’s lives that much more dangerous and unpredictable.

There is a really interesting exhibit happening at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford.  I believe it opened just yesterday, and will be there until August 3rd.  It’s called Inisde Rodin’s Hands: Art Technology and Surgery.  You can read Stanford’s coverage of it directly here.  Or you can watch this video with James Chang speaking a bit about noticing specific physical maladies in Rodin’s sculptures when he was an undergraduate, and how this project grew from that observation.  Now he incorporates the study of these sculptures into his hand surgery educational program where students diagnose and correct the maladies observed.

Sarah Hegmann, who I went to school with, put together this animation bringing Rodin’s hands to life as part of the exhibit.

I am a fool not to have mentioned it before, but the NAB is offering some great tutorials online right now.  There is a fantastic one airing right this moment about mograph and dynamics in medical animation by Thomas Brown.  Do check out http://www.c4dlive.com/ if you get a chance today, or through Thursday.

A friend recently sent me a link to some images by Travis Bedel.  His pieces are called anatomical collages in the writing about them.

This article in Juxtapoz shows a nice little collection of his work.  His anatomy looks right on.  And the fantastic floral motif seems like a fine thing to share on this the spring equinox.

Enjoy!

A few weeks back I did a little work on an inner ear illustration.  The head that I was designing to is copyright protected, but the main part of the inner ear itself wound up looking something like this.

There were actually several versions, some involving the ear canal and some not, but probably the coolest part about playing around with this was having these 3D models to play with.

http://audilab.bmed.mcgill.ca/~daren/3Dear/3d_models.html

Pulling those models into Meshlab I was able to rotate them to whatever angle I found convenient and view with or without the eardrum, or ossicles and what have you.  This is one of many snapshots I took from within Meshlab.

I would definitely recommend checking out those models to anyone either illustrating or studying the inner ear or any part of it.

They say that home is where the heart is, and I’ve finally completed the first painting here at the new house.  I guess this must be home.  This was a fun one to make.  I usually only do figures and faces in this kind of style, but I’ve been meaning to play with a little of what I learned about the body’s internals on canvas for a while now.  It was a good refresher too.  I so rarely look at organs anymore.  Most of the biology I see these days is at the molecular level.  So this was fun.

Today I am making a commitment to make this the year that I finally learn to really use Premiere.  I have had it with pushing After Effects to do longer animations than it is geared for, and it’s long past time to get over my old version of Final Cut Pro falling further and further behind the times, and the new versions are not going to redeem themselves.  The truth is, Premiere and After Effects have been crafted to work seamlessly with one another.  I just have to take the time to learn those tricks.  I’m about to have a Lynda.com subscription again, and I am making this a high priority goal.  Premiere has gotten really good in recent years and I know that I’ll like it more as I learn more of the same shortcuts I had in Final Cut Pro.  It’s not like I haven’t used it at all.  I just get angry with it for not being the Final Cut Pro I used daily for so much of my life.  Now I can use this one instead.  It’s time to get over this meager hurdle already.

Ulric Collette’s genetic portraits series has been getting some attention on the internet lately, and I’m going to add to that by pointing out her work here as well.  I’m posting some thumbnails to give you an idea of what she’s been doing.

Please visit her website and take a closer look.  The genetic similarities across the faces are really neat.  I particularly appreciate some of the ones that feature different generations and emphasize how faces change with age.

http://genetic.ulriccollette.com/

Artist, Luke Jerram is making headlines with his new collection of glass sculpture models of viruses.

If you follow this link, you’ll get to David Goodsell’s take on HIV (the first virus shown to the left there) and you can see the similarity.  It’s also a really awesome little interactive breaking down the individual molecular arrangement of the virus.
http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/101/static101.do?p=education_discussion/educational_resources/hiv-animation.html  In case you didn’t know, Goodsell is an outright master of medical illustration and representing molecules and viruses with incredible clarity and accuracy.

Larger images of the glass sculptures can be viewed here through The Verge’s coverage, where I first saw these.  It sounds like he is working with a virologist and a glass blower, and that neither are specifically a specialty for him.  I would love to know the name of the glass blower involved.  These are truly beautifully executed pieces.