Mostly nature and art (of a sort)
Jun. 17th, 2016 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heliopausaThere's so much stinking, stinking sad news out there. :(
Well... to some better news, or cheerful things, if not exactly news:
Scotland has achieved its emissions reduction target six years early! :) Go, Scotland!
The 50,000 hectares of Yarralin Cattle Station (which had been held under leasehold from the Crown, most recently by the Hooker Corporation) has been formally handed back to its traditional Aboriginal owners.
Is a comedy sketch art? If it is, then here's art protecting nature, in an ad made by two well-known comedians for an NGO in Vietnam, to campaign for tiger protection (youtube, one minute)
Where nature starts to look like art:
I really liked these eggs, all from the same species of bird - the tawny-flanked prinia, in Africa. So beautiful, like marbled silk!
The photo is by evolutionary ecologist Martin Stevens, and I found it and the info in this Guardian article.
Beautiful, and sneaky, too! The origin of these lovely patterns lies in the habit of the Zambian cuckoo finch, doing what cuckoo finches do, i.e. laying eggs which mimicked typical prinia eggs in prinia nests - but the tawny-flanked prinia has been - and still is - fighting back, by each individual hen now laying her own special signature style of egg! The egg-forging finches can't keep up! Go, wonderful tawny-flanked prinias!
Writing news: What with one thing and another, I haven't written a thing all year, apart from some three-sentence fiction, so I've been trying to kickstart my writing by launching back into a Narnia project I started last year. It began as a consideration of what could possibly be in those four books seen by Lucy on Mr Tumnus' bookshelves:
"They had titles like The Life and Letters of Silenus or Nymphs and Their Ways or Men, Monks, and Gamekeepers; a Study in Popular Legend or Is Man a Myth?"
And it's developed, in my head, into an attempt to show the gradual demolition/collapse of Narnia before and during the onset of the Winter, though showing its impact on a one Faun and his publishing house as revealed in a retrospective exhibition of some of the works produced, and associated papers. (The exhibition is supposed to be being mounted much, much later in a restored Narnia, which looks back in a kind of scholarly bemusement at those half-forgotten times.)
I started with Men, Monks and Gamekeepers, here, and am just about (i.e. probably tomorrow) to put up Nymphs and their Ways, but...
that one needed an illustration, I thought, and I can't draw! So there's been much fun here, at odd moments, while I tried very hard to produce something that might look something like a woodcut made by a Narnian artist in the immediate pre-Jadis period. :D Fun, but also much perplexity - how do arms actually go?, how does one differentiate in black and white, between what's hair, and what's outline of body? how does water go, in a woodcut? and so on. Tune in tomorrow to see me (not for the first time) look more than a bit incompo in public.
Well... to some better news, or cheerful things, if not exactly news:
Scotland has achieved its emissions reduction target six years early! :) Go, Scotland!
The 50,000 hectares of Yarralin Cattle Station (which had been held under leasehold from the Crown, most recently by the Hooker Corporation) has been formally handed back to its traditional Aboriginal owners.
Is a comedy sketch art? If it is, then here's art protecting nature, in an ad made by two well-known comedians for an NGO in Vietnam, to campaign for tiger protection (youtube, one minute)
Where nature starts to look like art:
I really liked these eggs, all from the same species of bird - the tawny-flanked prinia, in Africa. So beautiful, like marbled silk!
The photo is by evolutionary ecologist Martin Stevens, and I found it and the info in this Guardian article.
Beautiful, and sneaky, too! The origin of these lovely patterns lies in the habit of the Zambian cuckoo finch, doing what cuckoo finches do, i.e. laying eggs which mimicked typical prinia eggs in prinia nests - but the tawny-flanked prinia has been - and still is - fighting back, by each individual hen now laying her own special signature style of egg! The egg-forging finches can't keep up! Go, wonderful tawny-flanked prinias!
Writing news: What with one thing and another, I haven't written a thing all year, apart from some three-sentence fiction, so I've been trying to kickstart my writing by launching back into a Narnia project I started last year. It began as a consideration of what could possibly be in those four books seen by Lucy on Mr Tumnus' bookshelves:
"They had titles like The Life and Letters of Silenus or Nymphs and Their Ways or Men, Monks, and Gamekeepers; a Study in Popular Legend or Is Man a Myth?"
And it's developed, in my head, into an attempt to show the gradual demolition/collapse of Narnia before and during the onset of the Winter, though showing its impact on a one Faun and his publishing house as revealed in a retrospective exhibition of some of the works produced, and associated papers. (The exhibition is supposed to be being mounted much, much later in a restored Narnia, which looks back in a kind of scholarly bemusement at those half-forgotten times.)
I started with Men, Monks and Gamekeepers, here, and am just about (i.e. probably tomorrow) to put up Nymphs and their Ways, but...
that one needed an illustration, I thought, and I can't draw! So there's been much fun here, at odd moments, while I tried very hard to produce something that might look something like a woodcut made by a Narnian artist in the immediate pre-Jadis period. :D Fun, but also much perplexity - how do arms actually go?, how does one differentiate in black and white, between what's hair, and what's outline of body? how does water go, in a woodcut? and so on. Tune in tomorrow to see me (not for the first time) look more than a bit incompo in public.
