Month: May 2017

E. A. Seguy

Insect Prints by E.A. Seguy

E.A. Seguy was an artist and designer active in Paris during the first three decades of the 20th century. Very little is known about him; even his actual name and the dates of his birth and death are in dispute.

Seguy produced eleven albums of nature themed illustrations and patterns, drawing inspiration from papillons and other insects, flowers, foliage, crystals and animals. Seguy was one of few artists that successfully combined both Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles in his work. His brightly colored geometric patterns were intended to be used as inspiration for such decorative items as textiles and wallpaper.

Cormac McCarthy: “Maps of the World in Its Becoming”

Photographer Unknown, (The Stream)

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

–Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Anak  Krakatau

Anak  Krakatau

Anak Krakatau has grown at an average rate of five inches (13 cm) per week since the 1950s. This equates to an average growth of 6.8 meters per year. The island is still active, with its most recent eruptive episode having begun in 1994. Quiet periods of a few days have alternated with almost continuous Strombolian eruptions since then.

Hot gases, rocks, and lava were released in an eruption in April 2008. Scientists monitoring the volcano have warned people to stay out of a 3 km zone around the island. Several videos of Krakatoa on YouTube show recent footage of eruptions and of the inside of the crater as seen from the rim of the volcano.

On 6 May 2009 the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia raised the eruption alert status of Anak Krakatau to Level III. A Level Three alert signifies an increasing tendency toward eruption, relatively high unrest, and magna close to the crater. A recent expedition to the volcano has revealed that a 100-meter (328-foot)-wide lava dome is growing in its crater. The dome has two active vents that eject incandescent gas.

John Jude Palencar

“Tree Goblin, John Jude Palencar, Watercolor and Gesso

After receiving a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, John Jude Palencar received further training at the Illustrators Workshop in Paris before embarking upon a highly successful career of painting book covers. He is noted for an intense, almost photographic realism with bold colours, though his figures are sometimes juxtaposed with more abstract backgrounds.

Primarily working in the fields of Fantasy and Horror, he has painted covers for some high-profile books, like Christopher Paolini’s popular “Eragon” novels and Jacqueline Carey’s “Kushiel” novels, yet he has painted science fiction covers as well; one standout example was his painting showing a tiny figure against pale ruins for a 1986 republication of David Brin’s 1985 “The Postman”, vaguely similar but vastly superior to Tom Hallman’s cover for the hardcover edition. He has also worked outside the genre for magazines like National Geographic, The Smithsonian, and Time magazine.

Volcanic Crevasse

Photographer Unknown, Volcanic Crevasse at Grimsvotn, Iceland

Grímsvötn is a volcano in South-East Iceland. It is in the highlands of Iceland at the northwestern side of the Vatnajökull ice-cap.

Grímsvötn is a basaltic volcano which has the highest eruption frequency of all the volcanoes in Iceland and has a southwest-northeast-trending fissure system. The massive climate-impacting Lake fissure eruption of 1783–1784 was a part of the same fissure system. Grímsvötn was erupting at the same time as Laki during 1783, but continued to erupt until 1785. Because most of the volcano lies underneath Vatnajökull, most of its eruptions have been subglacial and the interaction of magma and meltwater from the ice causes phreatomagmaticexplosive activity.

Grimsvotn erupted again on 21 May 2011 with 12 kilometer high plumes accompanied by multiple earthquakes. This forced the cancelation of nine hundred flights in Iceland, the United Kingdom, Greenland, Germany, Ireland and Norway on the 22-25 May.

Greger Gaida

Two Sculpture Installations by Gregor Gaida” ‘Attaboys’ and ‘Kind und Kreide 2′

Artist Gregor Gaida lives and works in Bremen, Germany. His figurative sculptures often depict aggressive, even violent people engaging with each  other under unknown circumstances, as with this pair of mischievous aluminum boys titled “Attaboys” installed in 2012. Gaida says that he often bases his figures off of images found in magazines and books.

“The found footage is often no more than an impulse that is no longer discernible in the further development of the shape. Analogous to photography, my objects are three-dimensional snapshots. The characters are frozen in movement and often cropped along imaginary image borders. I transport the fragmented character of photos into the third dimension. Simultaneously, when dealing with color and options of shaping, painterly characteristics appear. Thus, the life-sized special interventions are formally attributed to sculpture but are equally part of painterly and photographic categories.”-Gregor Gaida

“Attaboys” appears to be a reinterpretation of another set of sculptures from 2008, “Kind und Kreide 2”, where two similar boys are seen drawing a line with chalk.