Year-end Review/The Plan for 2014

Side view of St. Mark’s in Venice

Watercolour

©2013 Charlene Brown

I agree with what Chris Guillebeau said on his Art of Non-conformity blog:  ‘We tend to overestimate what we can do in an average day but underestimate what can be done over the course of a year. Looking at a whole year in review, you may be surprised at everything you’ve accomplished… And next year, if you take this goal-setting process seriously, you may be even more surprised with how much you’ve done over the year.’ This concept has been working for me for five years now!

As I start the sixth year of 1150 Words, I hope to continue shifting from representational landscapes toward more stylized paintings. I’m planning to continue travel journaling (and, of course, traveling) as much as I can.  So far I have just one (still tentative) plan for 2014. It involves six countries, two of which I’ve never visited before.

I’ve painted every Google Streetview location presented in the Virtual Paintout this year – today’s painting is my second entry in the December 2013 location, Venice.  I plan to continue doing that and possibly adding some more night-time versions of the views I select. (Understandably, Google Streetview does not include much in the way of night scenes.)

I published Plein air Painting: the drama through Kindle Direct Publishing in April (I do not recommend this format for books with a lot of illustrations) and in paperback on Createspace  in May. I’m really pleased with the ease of use and results on Createspace. Both the Kindle version and the paperback are up on Amazon.  I’ve started a new book project, including almost 20 blog posts so far, with a working title, “The Fine Art of Physics.”

Over to the darkside again

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Vancouver after dark

Watercolour and marker

©2013 Charlene Brown

This is a night time version of a picture of Vancouver (as seen from the tower of the Vancouver General Hospital) that I painted acouple of months ago.   It required less guesswork than my previous darkside paintings, because I’ve actually seen Vancouver at night… That is not to say, however, that this is particularly realistic rendering of it.

Virtual Paintout in Venice

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Corner of Calle dello Spezier and Calle Fondamenta Megio

Watercolour

©2013 Charlene brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Venice this month  and I was lucky enough to land on this nicely composed Streetview almost immediately after I began maneuvering the Google camera boat around town.

I also had a look at one of the most frequently painted places in Venice – Basilica Di San Marco, but found the front was boarded up for restoration… But then I made the happy discovery that the side of the building, though also partly covered in protective boards and tarps, presented a very paintable design!  I’m not quite finished it, but hope to have it ready to post next week.

Another 'Darkside' painting

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Seoul in a different light

Watercolour and marker

©2013 Charlene Brown

I’ve extended the idea of painting night time versions of some of my Google Streetview ‘Virtual Paintout’ paintings to one of thelandscapes I did of Koreaa few months ago. 

Computer abstracting

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Hanging gardens of the Rockies

Watercolour and Photoshop™

©2013 Charlene Brown

I liked the abstract effect I got with Photoshop in HangingGardens of Quadra a couple of months ago, so I decided to try the same Photoshop filters on a watercolour of the top two falls in Johnston Canyon near Banff. Unlike on Quadra Island, where the gardens had ‘driftwood, ceramics, and metal sculpture combined with flowers and arrayed around rock pools or hanging from trees,’ the canyon featured an impressive, but much less structured, display of moss and icicles.

Presentation, rather than representation of the fourth dimension

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Athens earthquake

Acrylic and newspaper collage

©1999 Charlene Brown

I put together this collage after experiencing an earthquake in Athens in September 1999. It has been fitted into Chapter 3: Are artists better able to visualize problems and solutions? of the book outline I posted on November 4, accompanied by the following text.

As analytic Cubism (the process of fragmenting and abstracting artwork to give it a multiple perspective) progressed, Picasso and Braque gradually shifted to synthetic Cubism. Although still using all of the principles of Cubism, they then started making collages and assemblages. These new pieces further enhanced the idea of presentation, instead of representation, and the fourth dimension, time.

Painting cards - and an encouraging discovery

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Lake O’Hara X 2

Watercolour on 140 lb. cold press cards

©2013 Charlene Brown

When I painted the first four Lake O’Hara cards, I couldn’t decide which I preferred because the best bits weren't all on the same card.  I wrote that I might paint more in a couple of weeks… and then I’d have the best bits spread over eight cards. Well I only painted two more, this time in a more spontaneous style.  And once again, the parts that turned out didn't all find their way onto one card.

But one rather encouraging thing I’ve discovered, and perhaps there is a lesson here, is that every single card looks better standing alone, nowhere near another which may have a better waterfall or reflection or skyline or something.  

Virtual Paintout in Iceland

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Þjóðvegur

Watercolour

©2013 Charlene Brown

This month the Virtual Paintout is in Iceland. I wonder if anyone besides me headed straight for the famous Blue Lagoon… It must be the most photographed place in all of Iceland, and I thought it would probably be very paintable. Well, it turns out to be yet another place that the Google camera car didn’t really get to, and the view from the parking lot showed only the huge geothermal power plant – impressive, but not a pretty sight – with not so much as a glimpse of the huge expanse of warm cerulean water I had hoped to find.

Fortunately there turned out to be countless spectacular views of waterfalls and jagged lava  formations all along the south shore. Here’s a link to the one I painted.

Painting cards - decision time!

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Lake O’Hara X 4

Watercolour on 140 lb. cold press cards

©2013 Charlene Brown

   The first time I painted a set of cards, I experimented with two ways of taping cards to the board, folded or flat, and discovered when I removed the tape, a bit of one of the flat paintings ripped off.

   The next set of cards were all taped folded, two with only the back attached to the board, and two with all edges taped, resulting in cards with and without white borders. Not surprisingly, the flapping cards with only the back taped were really hard to work with… This time I attached them all folded and taped all round.

   My next decision is whether to paint more originals or make photocopies of the best one, and my problem is that the parts of the painting I’m happiest with are not all on the same card. I think I’ll paint more cards in a couple of weeks… but then I’ll probably have the parts I like spread over eight cards.

Virtual Paintout in a different light

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Lomnický štít after dark

Watercolour
©2013 Charlene Brown

Last month I did a second painting of Lima Peru, of an area that hadn’t been covered by the Google Streetview camera.  Because I was no longer limited by Google Streetview’s understandable lack of night scenes, I was able to select a striking night view of the Lima Cathedral.

I like the idea of painting night scenes, and decided to try re-visiting some of the previous Virtual Paintout locations I have done, and paint them ‘in a different light.’ In the case of Lomnický štit, I didn’t have a night photo available, so I just guessed what light might be available not long after sunset in this northwest-facing scene.

The second step in organizing a book

Inuksuk in Victoria Harbour |Watercolour and crayon |©2013 Charlene Brown

Explaining strange new ways of visualizing

Such as a curved universe

Or a parallel universe

 Or supersymmetry

Or fractals

In my first blog post about organizing a book, I mentioned I was following the advice of ChrisGuillebeau, who said the perfect introduction to a book often comes late in the writing process... I decided I should start lining up aspects of the book that I have already written about, and have been doing that for several blog posts now.

But… Chris also points out that when you work from the middle indefinitely, a manuscript will become disjointed, and it requires some effort to stitch it all together.  Before too long, you should draw up an outline. After that you will be ready to write an Introduction. 

So here’s my first stab at Step 2 – an outline.

The Fine Art of Physics

Introduction: Art and Science – the subjective and the objective

1.    History of breakthroughs in the arts and sciences – parallels and crossovers

2.     Is imagination more important than knowledge? – Einstein thought so!

3.     Are artists better able to visualize problems and solutions?

4.     Are artists more innovative, and capable of lateral thinking?

5.     The next Leonardo Da Vinci – with both subjective and objective genius

The illustration above, which I believe will fit into Chapter 3, shows excerpts from a computer-painted video, ‘The Theory of Everything’ that I made in 2008.  

The Theory of Everything, or Unified Field Theory, when it is finally formulated, will combine quantum mechanics and relativity, and could explain everything about physics.This would make just about anything possible – anti-gravity, time travel, inexhaustible convertible energy, teleportation… Strange new ways of looking at our universe are required.

Back to Lima

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Cathedral Plaza at Night

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

Earlier in October, I painted a picture for the Virtual Paintout, where pictures must be of Google Streetviews of the designated location.  I had planned on painting the Lima Cathedral, but found that the Google car hadn’t actually made it into the plaza, or anywhere near it for that matter.  I eventually found a perfectly acceptable street, Eléspuru, in the Rimac area, but recently decided to give Lima another try, and paint the elusive cathedral from photographs.

No longer limited by Google Streetview’s understandable lack of night scenes, I painted it at its spectacular best, the way it looks just after dinner – at about 11 pm!

The treasure of Siwidi

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Undersea and regular grizzlies

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

The Museum at Campbell River, one of the highlights of our recent trip up-Island, offers a fine venue for experiencing the rich heritage of the people of the coast. Vibrant and contemporary exhibits reflect First Nations cultures and lifestyles, dating back 8000 years, including the Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Coast Salish culture groups.

A not-to-be missed feature is ‘The Treasures of Siwidi,’ in which the powerful voice of a local Chief narrates the adventures of the ancestor Siwidi. Journeying to the Undersea World, Siwidi encounters a host of supernatural creatures, dramatically illustrated as a series of spectacular masks are revealed one by one, including many sea creatures such as octopus, whale, and my personal favourite, undersea grizzly. The 24 masks are the work of contemporary First Nations artists. 
It wasn’t possible to obtain a replica or even a picture of the mythical undersea grizzly with his striking sea urchin helmet, so I decided to paint a couple of them, fishing for salmon along with some regular grizzlies. 

Visualizing the passage of time with layers

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Ptolemais, Libya

Watercolour and Photoshop™

Originally one of the five cities of the 7^th Century BCE Libyan Pentapolis, Ptolemais was conquered by Alexander the Great in the 4^th Century BCE (and passed to his General, Ptolemy - hence the name), and conquered by Rome in the 1^st Century CE. Ptolemais was the site, in 301 CE, of an early attempt at wage and price controls – Diocletian’s Edictum De Pretiis – overlaid, in this computer painting, on the background of a watercolour of the present day ruins of the site. 

The best up-island trip yet!

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Hanging Gardens of Quadra

Watercolour and Photoshop™

©2013 Charlene Brown

Vancouver Island was first explored by British and Spanish expeditions in the late 18th century, and was originally called Quadra’s and Vancouver’s Island after Spanish navigator Juan de la Bodega y Quadra and British navy officer George Vancouver. The Spanish must have lost interest in land so far north because in the 19^th century when Quadra was dropped from the name they settled for it being given to a tiny island between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Vancouver Island covers 12,407 sq mi and Quadra Island is less than 1% of that at 120 sq mi!

I’ve just returned from another Gallery Associates trip to visit artists in the northern part of Vancouver Island, and on Quadra Island, which we reached by ferry from Campbell River. This picture is the view from one artist’s garden back towards Campbell River. As always, we found people’s gardens to be as splendidly inspiring as their studios and galleries, with driftwood, ceramics, and metal sculpture combined with flowers and arrayed around rock pools or hanging from trees.

Virtual Paintout in Lima, Peru

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Eléspuru, Rimac

Watercolour, crayon and marker

©2013 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Lima, Peru this month, and my first thought was to have a look at the Lima Cathedral and the townhouses of the original Conquistadors in the vicinity of the cathedral. I suspected the Baroque ornamentation of the Spanish colonial architecture would prove rather difficult to draw so I wasn't sure that was what I wanted to do, and when I got to that part of town on the map, I discovered the Google car hadn't got anywhere near the Plaza Mayor, so there were no Google Streetviews of any of the area I had in mind anyway… and no big decisions about whether or not to try the cathedral!

I just wandered around town and picked a Streetview with mountains in the background.  Here is a link to it  

Visualizing the passage of time with faded image of the past

Ziggurat at Ur

Watercolour and Photoshop™

The Sumerian ziggurat at Ur, built about four thousand years ago, originally had three levels.  

 The first level, most of which is still standing, has three huge stairways leading to a magnificent gate more than twelve metres above the ground.   In the illustration, the surviving part of this ziggurat is coloured. 

 The upper levels, which were later destroyed, are ghosted in white.

Another way of visualizing time

Diptych in the fourth dimension

Watercolour, gouache,crayon and Photoshop™

©2013 Charlene Brown

The right panel of this diptych is based on a photograph I took on a University of Victoria Travel Study program in Egypt in 2008. It shows a relief sculpture (reassembled from shards) on a wall in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri, across the river from Luxor. (The mural illustrates an expedition to the Land of Punt, an exotic country on the Red Sea coast in what is now Northern Sudan.)

The left panel shows the pyramids of the Black Pharaohs, also located in what is now Northern Sudan – I’ve never seen them, but I find their design fascinating. They are smaller, pointier and far more numerous than the more famous pyramids near Cairo. The fact they were built in about the 5^th century BCE nine hundred years after the gardens of Punt were sculpted at Deir el-Bahri in the 14^th century BCE, and are near the Nile, rather than the Red Sea, stopped me briefly…  until I thought of presenting the time/space divide as a diptych…

Another Drive-by Painting

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Spanish church

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

When I first glimpsed this church from the Alicante airport bus, it was almost dark and we were darting around one of the many hairpin turns on the way to Javea. All I could tell for sure was that it was curvy and ornate, and I thought perhaps it was designed by Gaudi, like the Sagrada Familia I painted a couple of weeks ago…

A few days later, on my return to Alicante in broad daylight, I discovered to my surprise that it was an Orthodox church, quite a large one (those blue things at the side of the road below the church are cars, not the recycling crates at least one person took them to be!)  And it’s much newer than Gaudi’s buildings – I’m pretty sure that’s a bank of solar panels at the back.

The Virtual Paintout is on the Isle of Wight

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Tuesday is Curry Night

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is on the Isle of Wight this month.  Unlike some of the Virtual Paintout locations I’ve painted, I’ve never actually been to the Isle of Wight, so I started exploring on Google Streetview without much idea of where the most appealing locations might be. 

It didn't take long to find this lovely setting in Brighstone. Here's a link to it (you need to pan the camera one click to the right to get the whole scene). I especially liked the sign advising that Tuesday is Curry Night…

How to organize a book

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Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

In designing the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí wanted something much more soaring than could be achieved with Roman arches but considered the Gothic style imperfect because it needs buttresses to counteract the outward pressure on the perpendicular walls. Believing that “the House of God should stand on its own,” Gaudí designed this Barcelona cathedral with paraboloid spires and vaults.  In fact, he frequently found solutions in natural forms, in helicoids as well as elliptic and hyperbolic paraboloids, and he made use of fractals, structures that split into smaller replications of themselves.

According to ChrisGuillebeau, the perfect introduction to a book often comes late in the writing process... You shouldn’t think you can’t really start until you’ve worked out a complete outline and written the introduction. He says you should start with what you know best. Work on that. Then work on something else… whatever you have to do, just keep going.

This is how I’m approaching my next book – a collection of blog posts relating to both art and science –with the working title ‘The Fine Art of Physics’… and when I saw Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia during a brief stop in Barcelona this summer, I decided to try to fit it into the book.  Somewhere.  I don’t yet know if it will go in a chapter on the history of parallel developments and crossovers in the arts and sciences, or a chapter that’s just about architecture, or maybe it should be mentioned in discussing the role of fractals in visualizing multi-dimensionality…

Which brings me to another point Chris Guillebeau stresses… When you work from the middle indefinitely, a manuscript will become disjointed, and it requires some effort to stitch it all together.  Before too long, I will draw up an outline, and begin at the beginning.

A prescient peripheral viewpoint

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Giverny

Watercolour and crayon sketch

©2013 Charlene Brown

The mid-19^th century invention of the camera lead to both an examination of Euclid’s assumptions about space, and science’s hold on the paradigms of art. 

And more specifically, after a few years, on the hold of the Academy des Beaux Arts on the artists of the time. Their rules of perfection and suitable content resulted in the rejection of the paintings of a new movement whom the Academy called Impressionists – and they weren’t smiling when they called them that, claiming that their paintings were merely illogical impressions of art, rather than the real thing with proper perspective.

In the 20^th century, these ‘impressionistic’ visualizations came to be regarded by scholars (clearly not members of the Academy des Beaux Arts) as prescient to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, of all things. I will work through that concept as soon as I can…

Euclid and Newton get together outside Paris

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Versailles

Watercolour sketch

©2013 Charlene Brown

In the Age of Enlightenment – corresponding approximately to the late 17^th to early19^th centuries – the great thinkers of the time began to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through what became know as The Scientific Method.

René Descartes (1596-1650) a French philosopher, after whom the Cartesian Coordinate System was named, united algebraic principles and visual space in developing analytic geometry.

The definitive jardin à la française, Versailles, begun in 1710, was said to be have been laid out as homage to Euclid’s postulates and the strict mathematics of Newton’s principles.

This period also featured extraordinary realism in painting... Perhaps I should have found a protractor and done this sketch 'properly.'

A significant Renaissance concept

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Ballooning over the Masai Mara

Watercolour and Photoshop™

©1996 Charlene Brown

The hot air balloon is not the concept I’m talking about here… although Leonardo daVinci probably had such a thing in his vast repertoire of ideas.

Rather, I’m using this Photoshopped painting to illustrate Renaissance artists’ understanding of the concept of infinity and the use of vanishing points and the visualization of depth using shadows.

This seems to have preceded by hundreds of years the realization by scientists such as Descartes that space is infinite.

Incidentally, I had some difficulty determining the directions of the sensational early-morning shadows in composing this picture using the dozens of photographs I’d taken from the balloon. They were a little easier to figure out after I realized that they all extended toward a vanishing point at eye level. And because we were in a balloon, eye-level was slightly above the horizon…

Our last night in Paris

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La Défense

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

On the last night of our Road Scholar Intergenerational Program in Paris, we went to the top of the Arc de Triomphe to watch the Eiffel Tower sparkling, and I made a video of the show… on purpose, unlike most of the videos I make with my digital camera. 
Turns out I’m not the first person to think of this – Google ‘Eiffel Tower sparkling Youtube’ and you will find almost 200,000 entries.  Mine turned out reasonably well, but I think it’s safe to say most of the versions on Youtube are better. So, if you want to see what it’s all about, please look there.

Then I decided to take advantage of our unique position to take some regular pictures in various other directions, including the view I’ve painted here, looking up the Ave de la Grande Armée and Ave Charles de Gaulle to La Défense. 
Begun in 1958, La Défense is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district, featuring many skyscrapers and La Grande Arche, a twentieth century version of the Arc de Triomphe (and at 110 metres, twice as high as the original).  It has been suggested that La Grande Arche could be a hypercube, or tesseract, projected on a 3-dimensional world, such as I talked about in my July 24 blog post… but I decided not to get my mind in a knot trying to think that through again!

The Classic Period (cont')

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Alexandria Serapeum
Computer painting
Charlene Brown

This painting of the Temple of Serapis at Alexandria doesn’t actually exist except on my computer.

A little background... After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in the 4th century BCE, a combined Hellenistic-Egyptian god in human form, equivalent to the very popular Apis, was introduced to reconcile the two belief systems. An impressive temple was built (apparently vaulted in lodestone) that housed a colossal wood and iron statue of Serapis “which was neither supported on a base, nor attached to the wall by any brackets, but remained suspended.”

Later Christians considered this engineering feat diabolical trickery and the temple was ordered destroyed in the 4th century CE. This miraculously suspended statue of Sirapis may not have actually existed, which would account for its absence in the list of the Seven Wonders of the World…

The Classic Period - a great era for both art and science

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Carthage overlaid with Phoenician alphabet

Photograph and Photoshop®

©2009 Charlene Brown

This computer painting combines photographs of the Punic ruins at Carthage and a bas relief of the Phoenician alphabet on a stone plaque at the Bardo museum in Tunis. 

The alphabet has been described as civilization’s first abstract art. The Greeks added vowels to it and created a visual communications breakthrough in the same remarkable ‘Classic Period’ that they solidified the spatial concepts of Euclidean geometry.  And they named the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ – works of art as much as science – and almost all of them Greek, while they were at it!

Visualizing n dimensions

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4D object + its 3D shadow

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

In devising a geometry of  more than three dimensions, mathematicians have determined that a four-dimensional cube would consist of eight cubes, just as a three-dimensional cube is made up of six squares. The hypercube (also called a tesseract) in Salvador Dali’s ‘Crucifixion’  has been suggested as an ‘aesthetically pleasing’ visualization of this concept… I don’t think so.

When I referred to the difficulty most people, including most geniuses, have in visualizing more than the usual four dimensions, in my blog post on Cubism on June 19, I wasn’t specifically referring to Dali, but now I am. I prefer my interpretation in 4D object + its 3D shadow.  The required eight cubes are aligned along the four extended diagonals of the purple cube, the four blue ones on the diagonals projecting out the back four corners of the cube and the orange ones on those emerging out the front.  Just as a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, a four-dimensional object casts a three-dimensional shadow, in this case the purple cube.

How to illustrate a physics textbook

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Glacier on a staircase

Watercolour, crayon and gouache

©2013 Charlene Brown

Marcel Duchamp intended his famous Nude Descending a Staircase to be “an expression of time and space through the abstract presentation of motion.” 

Duchamp’s masterpiece was initially rejected by both the Cubists and the Futurists, with one critic dismissing it as ‘an explosion in a shingle factory.’ This startling turn of phrase seemed like a good guideline for generating an ‘abstract presentation of motion’ – in this case the disappearance of a glacier over the hundred-year period from 1910 to 2010  as previously illustrated on 1150 Words.  

Virtual Paintout in Charleston, South Carolina

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Christmas at Marion Square

Watercolour and marker

©2013 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Charleston, South Carolina this month.  The Google Streetview of Marion Square, which you can see by clicking here was, of course, photographed during the day, and even then the Community Christmas Tree looked pretty impressive, but I thought it would be better with the lights on.