Anatomy and Art

I recently finished another painting.  I’m calling it “Remembrance.”

This one took a long time and was perhaps the messiest picture I’ve gotten myself into yet.  I did some new technique work with a sponge that turned out pretty well in the end.

I’m proud of this one.  And I believe she already has a buyer off in Oregon, so I’ll only be keeping this one for a short while.  That’s how some of them go.  I’m going to make sure that I have a good image to work with for prints before sending her off though.

Apparently restaurant showings do pay off.  Good to know.  Having my art up at Bunbelly has brought new eyes to my work, and I’ve been contacted by someone who is interested in buying “Woman in the Water.”

I painted her back in 2007, in my little studio apartment back in Los Angeles.  She’s been with me for a long time now, and now she will move on without me.

Been thinking about trying my hand at a small series of little yoga paintings. I’ve been getting more into it lately, taking a hatha class in the neighborhood pretty regularly, and I find myself wanting to paint some of the poses. I’ve got some really cool photos from a friend to study, and this evening I bought a book called Yoga Anatomy to give me a little more insight into some of the inner workings. I picked up a handful of little tiny canvases tonight too. I’ve never done a series. At least I’ve never done one in order anyways. This seems like the kind of thing I’d want to do more than one of though. Maybe if it takes, I’ll move on to more substantial canvases.  In the meantime it may be an opportunity to put out some more affordable work.

I recently had the pleasure of working on an animation to teach students about DNA cloning.  This is one of those exciting ones where I feel like we really added to what’s out there on this topic.  So naturally I wanted to share it here as well.

My house is so scantily clad right now!  I’ve put up most of the paintings I still have in a brand new Vietnamese restaurant called Bun Belly.  It’s my first restaurant showing, and I’m curious to see if anything comes of it.  My walls will be mostly bare for the next three months.  And then I’ll pack my paintings back in again in August.

I finally wrapped this one up.  This one was definitely a challenge, and I’m happy to see it finally get there.  Some images more than others seem to lend themselves to a potentially endless amount of adjusting and layer over layer over layer.  This was one of those.  I’ll be putting the protective gloss on soon, and then it’s ready for either sale or finding a nice place to hang here for a while.

Have you ever looked at a packed bag and tried to describe to someone else the exact position of your favorite t-shirt?  Without knowing the exact orientation of the bag and the viewer, words like up, down, left, or right are not so useful.  Also the shape of said t-shirt becomes very important.  Perhaps it’s rolled into a tight little ball and wedged into the neck of your left boot.  Or maybe it’s spread out flatly between your hoodie and your jeans.  Anatomists go to great lengths to accurately portray the shape and position of our internal structures.  And drawing them accurately, requires attention to many landmark points.

I’ve been getting to do some anatomical illustrations lately for Sapling Learning.  Most recently I was asked to illustrate the large intestine.  This one was interesting because not only did we want to get the large intestine itself to be accurate, but we also wanted to show some reference to where it falls within the body.  Initially we discussed another piece I made some months back regarding the four quadrants (yet another system we have to give reference within a body).  This view was too cluttered to see much of the large intestine though.

But a large intestine on it’s own, offers no frame of reference at all.  In fact, one of the references I saw when I was putting together our representation, tried to show a faint outline of the pelvis behind the intestine.  Upon looking more closely, I realized that the artist who had drawn that one had thought that the entire large intestine was seated within the bounds of the pelvis.  At one point it was suggested to me that I show the small intestine for frame of reference, but that’s the main thing causing clutter and blocking the view of the large intestine in the first image shown here.  So what I wound up doing was placing it within just the skeletal system, and then I was asked to go ahead and give a body outline, much like what was in this first one.  And I think that the result worked out nicely.

It’s certainly the cleanest looking intestine I have ever drawn.  Something about guts in vector has always seemed a little funny to me.  But I really like how this came together.  And I’m so glad to have taken the time to get the spacing all right in the first place so that adding in reference points wasn’t just an exercise in pointing out what errors I’d made.  In fact, a lot of my planning for this came from a piece I did back in grad school.  While it didn’t feature any of the digestive track, it was a very studied placement of the skeleton within the body and I was very specific about the heart and lung placement which were shown.

That class exercise was so useful, and I’ve come back to it again and again for various things.  Both the ribcage and the pelvis can be deceptive in how they sit in the body.  Personally, I always think that a ribcage looks tipped forward when it’s actually upright.  It’s easy to want to straighten it out for your illustration.  Even knowing about this optical illusion, I still have to fight the urge myself.  The pelvis is a little like that too, though one could argue that it just actually is tipped forward.  But if you are holding a pelvis apart from the rest of the body it came from, or if you are looking at a photograph of a pelvis, it’s easy to want to straighten it up too.

The spine is fabulous for reference.  Knowing the relationship between an organ and specific vertebra can tell you a lot.  But then you also have to remember that not everyone is packed in exactly the same, and even within the same person there is a certain amount of flexibility.  To return to the luggage example, we all know that the contents may shift while traveling.  The diaphragm moves up and down with every breath, as does everything that it moves with it.  And the act of digestion can certainly have an effect on the shape of the digestive track at any given time.  And there are differences between when  a person is upright or lying down.  I’m sure that things sit very differently when one is doing handstands.  But we find the landmark relationships that we know.  And when it’s important, patients are placed into known positions and always scanned before surgery, to keep surprises in the OR at a minimum.  And artists like myself go on fussing about levels and planes and curvature and just how much variety there is in the shape of a stomach, or whether to show a more taught or more draped transverse colon.

Last night I had a really good meeting with my accountant.  I’d only expected to stop in for a bit, and go over the basics, how my finances looked, and what I could be doing to optimize my circumstances.  Sure enough the conversation turned to life goals and career and art, and specifically my art, and he even bought one of my paintings, Tree #7.

I’ve been painting a lot these last few months.  It’s always tricky finding good stretches of time around my full time work in the digital arts.  But I’ve been spending a lot of nights in the studio so far this year, and that’s felt really good.

Lately my focus has been towards this one, but I still have a ways to go with it.

The art market in Austin is tricky.  We have a lot of artists, and a lot of people here care about art.  We don’t have much of an art market locally though.  That’s why I’ve been discussing the idea of a tri-city show with a group here called the Austin Arts Collective.  We’re looking to put together a show with a collection of local artists and take our pieces around to galleries in Houston and Dallas as well.  I’m personally hoping for a Human Form theme, so I can highlight a few of my figures, and because there is a body painter in the group, and I’d love to see her artwork walking around on models at our shows.  I’ll definitely post more on that as it comes together.

All in all, this feels like a time of focus with my art work.  And last night’s conversation was just the push I needed to get me thinking about the bigger picture with all that again.

Well, while things may not look any different, welcome to the newly hosted AnatomyAndArt.com!  With Speedy Puppy closing it’s doors in a couple of months, I’ve been making the transition over to A Small Orange, a web hosting company run right here in Austin.  So far, everything seems to be working.  So yay!

A lot has happened since my last post here.  Since my last post here, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.  That’s been huge, and just a real crash course in cancer treatments, ER failings,  ICU care, neurosurgery, and all of that.  I suppose I haven’t really had it in me to write about all that.

I also gave that talk to the 8th graders for career day.  And that was so worth doing, both for the reflection it gives you on one’s own path, but also for the connection you make with the up and coming generation.  If anyone ever asks you to do this, I have to recommend going for it.

The holidays have also come and gone.  I actually had a cute little Xmas card this year, created in 3D that I’d intended to share here.  I suppose I could go ahead and do that now belatedly.  Rocky and I do wish you all love and warmth for the holiday season, and future seasons as I’m not getting this up until January.

I also finished another painting.  I think it has a buyer in California already. And I started another one too.  So it’s been a very paint heavy beginning to the New Year.  And then just last night I met up with some fellow artists in Austin and we discussed potentially building a show to take our work into a couple of cities.  I’m loving the idea, and really hoping that it comes to fruition.

And so I suppose I’ll leave you with an image of the latest painting, and return with images on the one in progress as it gets further along.  Introducing Tree #8