Tag: nature
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We collected this water, soil, and plant material from two vernal pools that regularly form where we live. It is amazing to get this view into the under-the-surface activity of these ephemeral ponds. There are fairy shrimp, daphnia, worms, what look like gastropods, more that we can’t identify, and likely so much more at the microscopic level.
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A small sketch as I lay in bed with my leg elevated after knee surgery yesterday. This view has similarities to the woods at the back of the land we live on. The branches and forms made from quick scratchy pencil marks are imagined and don’t actually reference the true natural makeup of that space. Despite mostly making abstract artwork, when I actually set out to “sketch”, natural forms are usually what comes out. This is also the kind of mark making I give myself the most trouble with. As soon as a drawing attempts to represent something real, my…
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At a plaza here in town recently, I saw this scene from a distance in the fog and drove over to snap a few phone shots. This is a development site for new housing that used to be meadow and a pretty woods I hiked through a few times. A deep swath of the woods was cut down and the meadow scraped down and this year it looks like there is further excavation to probably make way for utilities and such. It’s an ugly eyesore and sure, people need homes but the way we treat the land to make that…
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We have a small cherry tree under a protective mesh bag and in the sunlight it becomes its own little world. It reminded me of this beautiful photo experiment by Diana Pappas and Tom Bland – https://pappasbland.com/17
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A recent post I made to Substack’s notes has been my only experience there of what is, for me at least, a “viral” post. I posted five images from a series of small watercolour “imaginary landscapes” that I made in 2020 and wondered whether they might make for an interesting zine. While I try not to pay too much attention to the number of likes and shares I get for things I post, it was hard to ignore getting roughly 500% more likes than one of my usual notes. The feelings I’ve had so far around those images getting far…
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Yesterday my partner Gayla and I spent a bit of time at one of the small public beaches that is close enough to our place to be a quick drive away. We live in Canada near the northern shoreline of Lake Erie. From that beach we can look across the relatively small and shallow waters of Erie and, on clear days, see the shoreline of New York, a small wedge of Pennsylvania, and possibly a bit of Ohio. This beach has a small lightly tended woody park between the thin cottage service road and the water. Tall oaks, shag bark…
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Back in 2016, my partner Gayla Trail and I collaborated to self-publish her fifth book, Grow Curious. She was the author and I did the design and artwork. I don’t talk about my design work here as much but I have been working as a designer since 1994 across a variety of media and formats. My design and art practices heavily inform each other. Grow Curious was the fourth of Gayla’s books I designed. We used Kickstarter to successfully fund a two-colour offset print run of 1200 copies. It was a labour of love and each of us pushed ourselves…
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^ Starlings used to nest in the eves of our old apartment. The birds (along with a few squirrels and the near-feral neighbour cats) are keeping our backyard view alive. The vast majority of those birds have been Starlings. The European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) is widely derided as a pest bird — like weeds on the wing. They were introduced to the United States in 1890 by Eugene Schieffelin (a member of the American Acclimatization Society) as part of the poetic/naive gesture of bringing “the birds of Shakespeare” to Central Park. Starlings now number in the teeming millions from the…