Let's keep it wild.

13 October 2012

Darwin with the finches

HMS Beagle in the Galapagos Islands painting by John Chancellor

On the second voyage of the HMS Beagle the young naturalist Charles Darwin was on board, and his work would eventually make Beagle one of the most famous ships in history.

Charles Darwin in 1881

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) was a British scientist who laid the foundations of the theory of evolution and transformed the way we think about the natural world.

Cactus finches by Elizabeth Gould (from Charles Darwin – The Zoology of the Voyage of the HMS Beagle, 1839-43)

« Darwin's finches are the emblems of evolution. The birds he saw on the Galapagos Islands during his famous voyage in 1831-1836 changed his thinking about the origin of new species and, eventually, that of the world's biologists.

Darwin wondered about the changes in shape of bird beaks from island to island.» (William Cromie)

Darwin's drawing

Darwin studied the wildlife on the Galapagos Islands, a group of islands on the equator, almost 1,000 kilometers west of Ecuador. He noticed that the finches on the different islands there were fundamentally similar to each other, but showed wide variations in their size, beaks and claws from island to island. For example, their beaks were different depending on the local food source.

Darwin concluded that, because the islands are so distant from the mainland, the finches that had arrived there in the past had changed over time. (Source)

( R ) evolution.

Drawing of 14 species of Galapagos finches by ornithologist David Lack

Darwin and the finches by Kayla Skogh

Darwin's finches by Jada Fitch

Darwin by Jenny Parks

Darwin's finches by Charley Harper

Darwin's finches by Diana Sudyka

Darwin with the finches by Joanna Barnum

Museum of Life - Darwin's finches

Darwin's mockingbirds by H. Douglas Pratt

11 October 2012

Bombycilla

The waxwings are a group of passerine birds characterized by soft silky plumage. Their fluffy feathers almost look like fur.

Waxwing bird, drawing by wildlife artist Lukasz Bednarz

Waxwings are sleek, masked birds with unusual red, waxy deposits at the tips of their secondary feathers. Okay! Now that explains their name in English.

Waxwings are very vocal birds: jaseur (chattering) in French!

Bombycilla, their genus name, is a French ornithologist's attempt at Neo-Latin for silktail, from Latin bombyx (silk / silk moth) and scientific Latin cilla (tail).

The French ornithologist was Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot (1748–1831).

Vieillot described a large number of birds for the first time, especially those he encountered during the time he spent in the West Indies and North America, and 26 genera established by him are still in use.

He was one of the first ornithologists to study changes in plumage.

He wrote and published books on birds, with illustrations by his friend Jean Baptiste Audebert.

AUDEBERT, JB / VIEILLOT, LJP - Le Promerops Rayé. Pl. 7, published in Paris, 1800–1802

Waxwings are small fruits aficionados. Birds and berries are both very photogenic and their reunion creates a stunning color palette, especially in winter time, with the beautiful color (gray-purple-grey) of the naked tree branches.

Hope you'll enjoy these photos of waxwings picking snowy berries by Russian photographer Irina Makushina.

Bohemian Waxwings Eating Apples in Maine

Waxwing bird, drawing by wildlife biologist and science illustrator Kevina Vulinec

06 October 2012

Paisatge ataronjat

The reason why Ernest Descals' blog is a monster blog is because Ernest Descals is a monster himself! A super-prolific urban landscape monster artist.

I went on his blog and downloaded soooo many paintings… I can't exhibit them all, I had to make a selection. So I decided to present his work through a theme, a color theme: orange, purple, brown.

Ernest Descals was born in 1956 in Manresa (Catalunya) Spain, a city where Saint Ignatius of Loyola stopped to meditate and pray in 1522.

Oh boy, it took me a freakin long time to understand that sentence! I first though the saint took a break from praying! Would you stop praying?! Anyway, The Spiritual Exercises were composed (1522-1524) by Saint Ignatius of Loyola while in Manresa.

Ernest Descals also is a prolific painter of soldiers and nudes. And he takes tons of (dramatically altered and stylish) pictures of himself.

ernestdescals@yahoo.es

04 October 2012

Scratchy silk

What is machine embroidery? I planned to present a blog post about it. And I went on youtube for checking out the technique. Instead, ribbon embroidery caught my eye, and this Russian video looked very artistic.

Вышивка лентами ЦВЕТОЧНАЯ РАПСОДИЯ

Rubans de broderie / RHAPSODY FLORAL

So I paused the video when the composition seemed particularly eye-catching to me and made screen captures.

The screen dumps spent a few minutes in Photoshop for their make over: more contrast, almost desaturated colors, dry brush filter.

Drybrush is a painting technique in which a paint brush that is relatively dry, but still holds paint, is used. The resulting brush strokes have a characteristic scratchy look that lacks the smooth appearance that washes or blended paint commonly have. (Source: wikipedia)

Stone ground, flour sacks and domestic dove

by Michael Dumas with dry brush, watercolor and gouache

The conditions in the interior of the mill influenced my choice of mediums when I set out to do this painting. I chose dry brush for its thin, textural, woven qualities, and gouache (which contains chalk) as being sympathetic to the dry dusty interior atmosphere. The gouache also seemed just right to achieve the bright reflective quality of the areas touched by sunlight. (Michael Dumas, realistic interpretator of nature)

03 October 2012

Without source erotica journey

[unknown artist]

This morning at tumblr.com I found this beautiful erotic serigraphy (also known as silkscreen or serigraph printing) and reblogged it, click. The illustration came without any info. So I went to Google search images. But "No other sizes of this image found."

In that case, the browser proposes "Visually similar images". It's funny and surprising where a search on the web can lead you!