Cicada 7/17/12

... found by the side of the road, during one of my walkabouts.... Cars were driving by, and I felt weird stooping down to pick it up it's lifeless body, but I couldn't just leave it there. Cicadas are one of my personal totems... dead ones appearing at significant times.

I guess the Dog Days of Summer are almost upon us... already? 

Meanwhile, there's shortly to be a "For Sale" sign going up in front of my house. This means, I will probably have little time for blogging. Wish me luck, and enjoy what remains of this summer!

Till next time...

D

(Later note: A future - 2013 - post in which the cicada, once again, emerges: The Jewel - Image and Premonition)

Queen Anne's Lace

Queen Anne's Lace flower - "live' scan

"Her body is not so white as

anemony petals nor so smooth—nor

so remote a thing. It is a field

of the wild carrot taking

the field by force; the grass

does not raise above it."

- excerpt from William Carlos William's "Queen Anne's Lace"

Trans-D is not generally a "how-to" digital art site, but every now and then I get the urge to document my methods of madness as they present themselves. Todays foray into digital technique was inspired by a common roadside wild-flower I come across frequently in my weekly walkabouts - Queen Anne's Lace, also known as the "wild carrot". Like the starlings in my last post, Queen Anne's Lace also has the dubious distinction of being an "invasive species"... which pretty much just means it's a survivor... give it an inch and it takes a mile. That's okay by me... I'm a "plant person". Which pretty much means I have more of a rapport with plants than I do mammals. But, make no mistake - and even Science is coming round to this opinion - plants do have a kind of sentience... an alien one in many respects, but a kind of consciousness none-the-less.

That being said, for all of it's notorious robustness, Queen Anne's Lace, which got its name from a tiny red floret that sometimes appears in its center - I've yet to see one - said to represent a drop of blood from Queen Annes finger which she pricked whilst tatting lace - also has its selling points. It's seeds, for instance, are often used by women for contraceptive purposes. It is also the host food for the larvae of the Black Swallowtail butterfly. Apart from it's other medicinal properties, it is also used by Blue Jays to line their nests - apparently its foliage contains a natural insecticide. Oddly enough, in organic gardening, it's recommended to plant Queen Anne's Lace - along with chrysanthemums and marigolds, etc. - as a "companion plant" in your garden, for the opposite reason; it attracts beneficial, aphid-eating insects like ladybugs.

My sudden interest in the plant, however, has nothing to do with any of that. Basically, I've been inspired to create a new image which insinuated itself into my middle eye last week... another of my humanoids... this time an ancient (possibly) Martian woman who wears a singular veil partially obscuring her face. I'm not here to argue about the reality of Mars - for an artist, if something emerges from the creative unconscious, one just runs with it... or perishes. That simple.

So, the veil is key in this illustration, but how to create it? My mind's eye rested on the Queen Anne's Lace growing by the roadside. On impulse, I plucked one - apologizing and thanking the plant first (silently), I might add - placed it on the scanner bed, and took my best shot. Above is my scanned image of the flower. Lovely as it may be, I still didn't quite see how it'd be useful, so, I did what any artist should do - I blew it up. Musing, I snipped out a fragment and began rearranging it  (via cut & paste) - organic geometric patterns are, to a great degree, my forte. Experimenting with this arrangement, I finally cleaned up a version, tiled it and - presto - Queen Anne's Lace created with Queen Anne's Lace! It's not what I intend to use for my Martian veil, but I thought I'd share it anyway.  I also realize there's plenty of fractally, computational ways of creating patterns digitally - but, this is my preferred way!

So, here are three steps to virtual "lace-making". Click on images for larger views.

the blow-up

the pattern

the tile

And this is why I went digital! :-)

In Search of the Transdimensional: Murmurations (Repaired, 12/2023)

I was sent a link to the above Vimeo (new link for Sophie Windsor Clive & Liberty Smith) by a friend, not long ago, which really set my mind whirling. I didn't connect it with recent work, but, in a strange way, it and my recent preoccupation with nature - specifically the woods behind my house - do somewhat go hand in hand, so to speak. The Green Man is all over my psyche these days.

Currently I'm working on an illustration for an old children's story of mine... about a wood-elf. No, I'm not referring to Tolkien's variety - as lovely as they may be - nor the pretty little Victorian fairy variety either. Without going into detail, however, I've felt oddly connected to the natural world again... in the way that healthy children generally are, and my current illustration features a bird and a beech tree. So, it's all about birds and trees... and bugs.... and, for an artist, the amazing spaces in-between.

I've heard of murmurations before... which is a rather perfect word describing a flock of starlings... but what few clips I've seen never did justice to the actual phenomenon itself, which is fairly astounding.

Starlings, of course, at least the variety one sees around the east coast of the USA, are fairly obnoxious birds, and the most scruffy, least attractive birds I've ever seen. But then, I've never witnessed a murmuration... I'm not even sure they occur here... certainly none so remarkable as the ones shown in this video of Otmoor, below. And the starlings across the pond are quite handsome in their own way, though, apparently, not terribly popular there, any more than they are here.

In any case, after viewing the video above - and really, the reaction of the women at the end is priceless -  I consulted Youtube and found two videos composed by Dylan Winter featuring some breathtaking starling formations over Otmoor, England.

Interestingly enough, Otmoor and its environs were said to be an occasional haunt for Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. His chessboard in Through the Looking-glass was said to be inspired by Otmoor and the area is known to this day as Alice's Meadow. (Note: Not only are European Starlings under attack, but apparently Otmoor was, too, till concerned citizens rallied and saved it from the bulldozers! See here.)

According to Winter's short documentary (found here) murmurations happen every day throughout the winter! Winter makes a tepid case for predation habits and social status as an explanation for the birds' behavior... but I get the impression that he's no more convinced than I am.

A predator's search strategy? Starlings maneuvering for social position...? Somehow I think there's more to the phenomenon than simplistic biological explanations. Why then do starlings take part in such remarkable displays of aerodynamics? My guess is because they can. And these displays are not motivated by biological needs but - dare I say - are inspired by needs and abilities humans can just barely understand. We do, however, engage in sports - feats of physical prowess exhibiting the capabilities of the human body to conquer limitations imposed by the three dimensions of the "solid" world. "See what we can do?" is our implication as we turn our somersaults, or fly thru the air over an ice-skating rink.

I think the birds are doing the same. "Ah, but see what we can do?" they seem to be saying. And don't you just wonder how they do it? How thousands of birds can form massive currents in the air with their bodies, synchronized in ways no human can imitate? Apparently science affords us no answers. Not even the most complex algorithm can explain what we're seeing. And, keep in mind we are only seeing these formations from one angle at a time. (!) 

The bird's odd dance has an almost alien, enchanted quality - like something you might find in one of Merriam Zimmer Bradley's Arthurian tales. I think of Lewis Carroll and his marvelous looking-glass. I think of old wives tales and folk tales featuring sorcerers and harbingers of death. I think of moire patterns and broken symmetry... I think of M.C. Escher and his tessellations.

(2023 note: see also: this Guardian article.)

But I wonder, is this a transdimensional phenomena we're witnessing... an indication of some vast organic fabric of which we can only glimpse - or wholly miss -  through  our telescopic lenses and Hadron colliders? Can the discovery of any "god-particles" really fill in the gaps in our knowledge? I've often felt that animals, and wild-life in general know a great deal more than they're able to let on... but then, perhaps, "knowing" is somehow different for the denizens of the natural world. I suspect that the starlings effortlessly and gracefully gliding over Otmoor are not thinking about or planning their activities, writing "How To" books, or uploading themselves on to Facebook. They have no need for words, diagrams or marketing strategies... they're simply utilizing elements of physical reality we have little recognition of, coupled with abilities to traverse space and time in ways that render our mass-transit systems (and mass-communication systems) clumsy and infantile.

So, here's to birds, particularly starlings - godspeed, feathered cosmonauts!

***

PS: Synchronistically, that night, after writing this post, I was watching a PBS mystery centered around the theme of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark". From the Wiki article:

"Here is how Carroll "explained" the Snark in 1887: I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse – one solitary line – For the Snark was a Boojum, you see. I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but I wrote it down: and, sometime afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say

In the midst of his laughter and glee

He had softly and suddenly vanished away

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."


***

PPS: Regarding a comment I made on this post regarding magnetism, I happened to find this article about the earth's magnetic fields and it's effects on animals. Could our starlings be utilizing these magnetic fields for their own purposes? 

Got me. But it doesn't really rule out transdimensionalism... as I suppose one can view a magnetic field as a kind of transdimension... ;-)

***

7/20/12 UPDATE: I found this unfortunate afterword to my murmuration post on Graham Hancock's news page tonight. Guess it's a quick trip from the "invasive" list to the "endangered" list these days...