Cosmic Calendar: The Cambrian Explosion

You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!

December 15th on the Cosmic Calendar:  The Cambrian Explosion!  Before the Cambrian period, while there were a few multicellular animals, most were still single-celled.  When they felt ambitious, they might build a stromatolite.  Just before and at the beginning of the Cambrian, something — we yet know not what — kicked evolution into high gear and a variety of animals and other organisms appeared similar to the number of species we have today.  They were almost all different animals than we see today — now they’re mostly if not all extinct — but there was a similar variety as in the present.  This development is what is referred to as the Cambrian explosion.  The Earth was finally populated with life in similar numbers to how it is today.

I painted the Cambrian Explosion once.  It’s still one of my favorites of my paintings.

Cambrian Explosion, small painting 12, acrylic on 8″x10″ canvas board, March 2012

Those are my impressions anyway.  It really looked more like this:

Cambrian Trilobite

Opabinia

Anomalocaris

A year of painting and blogging!

Today I have been writing this blog for one year.  🙂  I started this to blog my paintings, suspecting that getting a little feedback on them would motivate me to keep me painting.  It worked!!  Moreover, I took Jim’s advice and decided to stick to a schedule of posting twice a week.  Though I did shift my original Tuesday/Friday schedule to Wednesday/Saturday, I still cannot believe I have actually posted twice a week — every week — for a full year.  Of course some posts have been… lackluster, but then I’ve also been surprised by which have been more popular.

So on this, the conclusion of year one, I want to sincerely thank all of you.  Thank you.  Thank you for visiting!  It’s not flattery — it’s straight truth when I tell you that it’s your comments and likes that keep the posts and paintings coming.  🙂

I want to especially thank Jenna, Marina, Dani, Joseph, and QueridaJ for all the artistic support and encouragement!  Thank you so much!  🙂

Here is a slideshow of the OMIGOD 61 paintings (mostly) I’ve completed this past year:

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Small painting 22

Small painting 22, acrylic on 8×10 canvasboard, July 8, 2012

Small painting 22, acrylic on 8×10 canvasboard, July 8, 2012

Small painting 22, acrylic on 8×10 canvasboard, July 8, 2012

Small painting 22, acrylic on 8×10 canvasboard, July 8, 2012

Here is small painting 22, probably the last small painting!  🙂  It’s the last of the small 8″ x 10″ canvasboards anyway, I’m not planning on buying more,  and in my head I’ve already moved back to 11″ x 14″ canvases as my usual format.

I really cannot think of a name for this one.  I was just experimenting with blue and orange here, and with rectangles.  Still needed a few dots though in the end!  I might just call it ‘Small painting 22: The Last’.

An idea hit me today — I should take painting requests!  Of course since I usually like painting non-representational abstracts, if you request say, a dog, the end result may in no way whatsoever resemble any canine ever bred or not bred on this planet.  Or maybe it will, just vaguely!  But a request from you is an idea for me, and I will hold your request in my mind as I paint.  Whether recognizable or not, I think the effect that may have on what I paint could be interesting!

That said, “what” would you like me to paint?  🙂

Memories of Homeworld #2, Small painting 21

Memories of Homeworld #2, small painting 21, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 6, 2012

Memories of Homeworld #2, small painting 21, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 6, 2012

Memories of Homeworld #2, small painting 21, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 6, 2012

Memories of Homeworld #2, small painting 21, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 6, 2012

So I had all this yummy orange left over from Departure… what to do with it?  I grabbed a canvasboard and just started painting.  Then I painted some more.  Then I filled in the rest.  With the two long rectangles, textures, and marks.  The next thing I knew, I had painted another ‘Memories of Homeworld‘…

This is an interesting way of painting — putting down something, anything, then another thing, maybe a third and then just filling in the rest.  It stays spontaneous all the way through, and avoids the long boring part a painting like Departure, or especially Deployment, has in the middle.  Paintings like that are very interesting when I’m doing the initial sketch, and interesting at the end when I’m adding details and final touches, but wow can they get boring in the middle when I’m just painting large areas of color and maybe adding additional coats and waiting for them to dry.  After I’d painted this, I realized I had painted Memories of Homeworld mostly the same way.  A few days later I painted another painting this way and finished it very quickly.  It was fun all the way through!

Departure, Small painting 20

Departure, small painting 20, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 1, 2012

Departure, small painting 20, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 1, 2012

Departure, small painting 20, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 1, 2012

Departure, small painting 20, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, June 1, 2012

Words words words.  Need some words I guess.

I wanted to paint more of a three-dimensional abstract… with three-dimensional abstract shapes.  Most of what I’ve been doing lately has tended to be flat.   So I did.

So, “Departure”.  They’re not exactly spaceships…  They’re too colorful for that.  They’re artships, a caravan of them filled with artists, heading out to found a whole new galaxy of art…

Because somewhere deep down I feel like that would help; like that’s something we need more of…   Hmmm.  So many people are taught to think they “can’t draw”.  It’s sad really.  So many in our culture are set up to suffer from the illusion that they simply have no creativity to express…  It’s such a sad, sad lie.  Many never find their creative outlet because they’ve been convinced they just have no need of one.

Yeah, so anyway, I didn’t realize this painting was so deep for me!  🙂  Wow.

The artists in the artships are all the people who think they can’t draw.

Small Painting 19: Trilogy. Calling it done.

You may have seen this before, a while ago.  I intended it to be a background for something.

It has not changed since then, I’ve just finally realized it was already finished at that point, like Brian said…  So I’m just calling it done.

Trilogy:

Trilogy, small painting 19, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, April 17, 2012

Trilogy, small painting 19, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, April 17, 2012

Trilogy, small painting 19, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, April 17, 2012

Trilogy, small painting 19, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, April 17, 2012

Me, with the mental block

• I have realized and decided that these non-representational abstracts really have no ‘top’ or ‘bottom’, no ‘up’ or ‘down’.
• I have blogged about this a few times.
• I have been meaning to show them from more angles.

I just keep forgetting to do it!

Fried eggs and thumbtacks, inverted, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, May 26, 2012

Fried eggs and thumbtacks, rotated, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, May 26, 2012

Fried eggs and thumbtacks, rotated, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, May 26, 2012

Fried eggs and Thumbtacks, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, May 26, 2012

A reeeeeal painting! Made with paintbrushes!

Finally!  A real painting!  No palette knives, no string, no paint smooshed between folded paper!  A real painting made with real paintbrushes!  (mostly)

Fried Eggs and Thumbtacks:
(small painting 18)

Fried Eggs and Thumbtacks, Small painting 18, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvasboard, May 26, 2012

Ok the gold and silver ‘thumbtacks’ are drips of liquid acrylic — the bump on each just formed as they dried, which I thought was pretty cool — and the yellow scrolling design was made with a craft pick, but everything else was done with good ol’ trusty paint brushes.

Fried Eggs and Thumbtacks was inspired by David Hockney’s 1993 Still Life in Landscape, and by pretty much everything sbmacinnis does.  Thanks for the inspiration Stephen!

Still Life in Landscape, David Hockney, 1993

I thought a lot about yummy fried eggs as I painted this, but then I forgot about that and I haven’t gotten around to making yummy fried eggs yet…

If you’re painting food, maybe you should be cooking — or better yet, eating —  instead?  Lesson learned?   I dunno…  🙂

Sunrise over the garbage pile, small painting 17

Sunrise over the garbage pile, small painting 17, acrylic on 8″ x 10″ canvas board, May 2012

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”
– John Cage

I must admit, my head is definitely not in the same place as John Cage when he said that.

Yes, I cannot put my finger on why I dislike it.  And there are parts of it I do like.  And I am getting used to it overall.  Time and acceptance are blunting my initial reaction to whatever this is I’ve wrought.

Do I dislike it because it’s too busy?  Arguably it is.  But I know many of you like that.  No, this is not the reason.

Do I dislike it because there’s still too much icky green from the blue and yellow washes that ran together?  Maybe.  I have spent most of the time on this trying to paint better things over that.  Some of those are the parts I like — mainly the blue and white northwest of the sun — but as I was working on this it seemed like nothing I did could ‘fix’ it.

My daughter even helped.  The upper elongated green blob on the left is hers.  🙂 That didn’t fix it either.

At first glance my overall impression is still “ick”.  It has something to do with the red blobs in both upper corners, though they look fine, even good, of themselves.  I find my eyes resting on the sun I painted over the mess, taking solace there.  Which is why I painted it.

This is the painting that started like this:

The hopeful beginnings of “Sunrise over the garbage pile, small painting 17″, acrylic on 8″ x 10” canvas board, May 2012

Anyway, it’s a painting and I am done with it.  It’s a small painting, it’s experimental, on a cheap canvas board,  and I’m moving on.

Enjoy!  🙂  If you can…

Memories of Homeworld, small painting 16

Memories of Homeworld, small painting 16, acrylic on 8" x 10" canvas board, April 2012

This is the painting I started by collecting the drips of paint that ran off of Crazy Go Nuts!  Those are the large blue area from the center to the upper right, the silver you might see inside of that, and the smaller blue drips to the left of either end.  The other silver and indian yellow wash/drip areas were made with test tubes!  🙂  Then I filled in some areas and it was pretty much mark making from there.

Neither photo really does the colors justice, but here it is with camera flash, to show how shiny the silver is:

Everything's Shiny Cap'n!!