Predictive Analytics: continuing a series emphasizing extrapolating, visualizing (and painting) unanticipated outcomes

Getting caught Greenwashing

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop™

©2023 Charlene Brown

According to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (July 24, 2023), ‘greenwashing’ is about misrepresentation, misstatement and false or misleading practices in relation to environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials.

Unfulfilled ESG promises lead to shareholder groups, such as university pension funds, divesting their holdings and to consumers switching brands and boycotting products.

This predictive data visualization is my interpretation of the rise, fall and rise again of stock value (orange line) and product sales (pink line) related to specific marketing events (identified by * in the painting) – a ‘green’ marketing campaign, getting caught ‘greenwashing’ a product or company policy, followed by honest damage control and policy change, over a six-year period. 

 

Paint Every Mountain: compiling a small book about hiking and painting

Winter Sunrise at Lake Louise

Watercolour and crayons

©2023 Charlene Brown

The third of my ‘2022’ projects that I’ll be working on for the rest of 2023 is a small book about hiking and painting in mountains all over the world.

Part of the book will be devoted to winter watercolour painting en plein air when the plein air is too cold to do much of anything with actual water. Beginning with white (and, in this case, neon pink) crayons, then finishing the painting in some nice warm place, is the answer.

There will also be a section on achieving other effects with white crayons (and a cautionary tale about where you obtain your white crayons), as well as special uses for purple (my personal favourite), and ‘neon’ orange and green.

Creative Archaeology: continuing ‘Time Travel with a Bag of Crayons’

Antikythera mechanism

Watercolour, crayon, marker

©2023 Charlene Brown

An intricate mechanism, considered to be the world’s first analog computer – dating from the first century BCE, was found in 1900 in a shipwreck near the island of Antikythera in Greece. The recovered fragments of what became known as the Antikythera Mechanism are in the National Archeological Museum in Athens. 

In 2019, I reassembled these fragments and overlaid the result on a sketch I made in 2007 at the Posidonius School in Rhodes. There are many theories as to who designed and built this ingenious mechanism. Our tour guide on a shore excursion from a Black Sea cruise was a firm believer in the hypothesis, based on x-ray computed tomography and notations about solar eclipses, that it did in fact originate at this location in Rhodes.

I recently updated the 2019 painting, after hearing about a more complex version of the Antikythera Mechanism appeared this year under a new name, The Dial of Destiny.   This surprisingly intact and polished machine, now credited to Archimedes, is newly capable of time travel and was found by Indiana Jones, of all people!

Graphic Novel: completing ‘By-election in Exceptional Pass’

I have occasionally tried to add people to my landscape paintings, solving the problem of not being very good at it by placing them as far away as I decently could.

I had one of my grandsons, an art student at Concordia University at the time, draw the people for my first graphic novel, but he’s a professional artist now and doesn’t have the time (and I can’t afford him). And it’s taken weeks to summon up the nerve to add people to the graphic novel I’m writing now. 

Drawing on a smart phone screen by an engineering student on coop assignment as a cell tower inspector, to illustrate the inaccessible position of a tension meter on an anchor cable.  (The top of the 400’ tower was easier to get to than that meter.)

Finally, inspired by the above spontaneous drawing on my granddaughter’s blog, I decided to go for it.

I can hardly do anything but phone people on my smart phone, so I didn’t go so far as to try it there.  I used a full-size computer, guiding the Photoshop brush tool with a mouse, and have convinced myself that the resulting stick-people-wearing-clothes are appropriate for the stylized background paintings.

An illustration near the beginning of the graphic novel I’m writing