Admin Stuff: Fridays.

I’ve been doing a Cool Stuff Friday post since April ‘016. Going to be a change. Fridays will be all art days, giving me a chance to cover so very many wonderful things, which I’m much happier doing anyway, rather than dealing with all the upsetting stuff in reality land. This will give me the opportunity to stay happily under my rock for a day as well as indulge in sharing so many things I love and find fascinating. Hopefully, people who are kind enough to stop by Affinity will find much to love and interest them, too. There’s just so much to share, and there never seems to be enough time. In over a year, I haven’t found time to share one thing from The Public Domain Review, one of my favourite places to get lost. Here’s a small sample of why I like to get lost there:

Gynecological Gymnastics from Outer Space. (1895)

Aratea: Making Pictures with Words in the 9th Century.

Geographical Fun: Being Humourous Outlines of Various Countries. (1868)

So, starting tomorrow, Fridays will simply be mostly fun, sometimes serious, and I hope, always informative.

Ritchelly Oliveira.

© Ritchelly Oliveira.

Ritchelly Oliveira is a Brazilian visual artist, predominantly working in the realm of portraiture. His images depict emotive studies of usually male figures, sometimes layered with natural imagery of flowers and birds. The characters are seen to both ignore and interact with the other components in the frame, and Oliveira creates playful areas of negative space that enhance the emotions perceivable in the drawings. Particularly in his portrait series ‘Lacunas’ (translating to ‘hiatus’ or ‘gap’), the pieces present an exploration of love and desire, offering a personal insight to the artist’s belief that “love can transform people in a way that is beautiful to capture.”

Beautiful, poignant work. You can see more at iGNANT.

Time for Goop.

No, not that goop. The real stuff. As every needlesmith and other handcrafter knows, hand care is extremely important. You can’t have rough bits of skin snagging expensive materials and so forth. So, goop. When your skin reaches a too rough to work point, spoon a bit of sugar (couple tablespoons) and the oil of your choice, whisk it up, and have a good, long hand scrub. Most artists have their own formula, some prefer specific sugars, or coarse salt, and the oil choice varies quite a bit. I usually go with olive oil. I don’t use coarse salt, because I can always be counted on to have small nicks on my hand somewhere.

How Hummingbirds Work. WOW.

Hummingbirds often brave downpours to gather the nectar needed to avoid starvation. This Anna’s hummingbird shakes off rain as a wet dog does, with an oscillation of its head and body. According to researchers at UC Berkeley, each twist lasts four-hundredths of a second and subjects the bird’s head to 34 times the force of gravity. Even more remarkable: Hummingbirds can do this in flight as well as when perched.
SOURCES: VICTOR ORTEGA-JIMENEZ AND ROBERT DUDLEY. Photographs by Anand Varma / National Geographic.

I am just filled with awe after watching this:

Space may be the final frontier, but scientists have found plenty of head-scratchers right here on one of Earth’s zippiest creatures, the humble hummingbird. The July issue of National Geographic Magazine includes stunning photography by Anand Varma of ornithologist Christopher Clark’s experiments studying how the Anna’s hummingbird sees, moves, and eats.

Clark recreated studies from UC Berkeley and the University of British Colombia that use smoke, optical illusions, and specially-created tools in conjunction with high-speed cameras to reveal hummingbirds’ strange body parts. For example, the reason they can hover is because their unique bone structure allows them to create lift on the upswing, as well as the downswing of their wings.

You can see and read more about this at The Creators Project. I might have to put that video on a loop.

A 3,700 Year Old Smiley Face.

Painted flask from 1700 BCE found in a burial under a house in area A East, Karkemish (photo courtesy Nicolò Marchetti).

Archaeologists in southern Turkey have dug up an ancient precedent to the Kool-Aid Man. Recent excavations at the ancient Hittite city of Karkemish have revealed a bulbous pitcher decorated with a faint smiley face, as Andalou Agency first reported. At 3,700 years old, the grin predates by a long shot what scientists in Slovakia had previously dubbed the world’s oldest smiley face, a 17th-century drawing on a legal document.

As head researcher Nicolò Marchetti put it, “We have probably found the oldest smiley emoji. We do not know with which purpose the craftsmen drew this symbol on the pitcher, but we call it a smile.”

Marchetti, an associate professor at the University of Bologna, has been leading the seven-year long excavations at Karkemish, which today lies along the border between Turkey and Syria. The short-necked pitcher is one of the most interesting artifacts found so far at the site, which has also yielded a number of urns, pots, and vases. Found in a burial chamber beneath a house, the unusual vessel was once used for drinking sweet sherbet. It will eventually go on view at the nearby Gaziantep Museum of Archaeology — so yes, you’ll be able to get a selfie of yourself smiling with the one-of-a-kind, jolly jug.

Via Hyperallergic.

Tongue Tide!

Purgatory Pie Press, “Volumptuous: Hanging Tower of Babble” (2017) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic).

Hyperallergic has a write-up on what sounds like a very grand show indeed, Tongue Tides, in Long Island City. I would so love to see this in person.

Are you ready for volumptuous? This hilarious sign by Purgatory Pie Press dangling from Flux Factory’s ceiling, part of “Volumptuous: Hanging Tower of Babble,” a large installation of hanging signage, is a fitting mascot for this playful summer show. Tongue Tide invites us all to play a little more with language, and to ponder other languages besides English. It’s a must-see for writers and wordsmiths and is well worth the trip to Long Island City.

Queens is the most linguistically diverse area on the planet. No other place boasts so many languages in such close proximity, something Rashedul Hasan and Dan Silverman illustrate in “We Are the Queens of New York” (2017), a map piece where dots of different colors represent these many varied languages. It’s really powerful to dwell on just how unique the borough — and New York City as a whole — is from this perspective.

[…]

It’s also good to ponder this map because, with all due to respect to Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker, English does not own a monopoly on wit. Many turns of phrase and poetic expressions in other languages pack a punch, even in translation. Some of the best work in this show plays with other languages to give us glimpses of their clever bons mots.

An intriguing artist book by Magali Duzant, A Light Blue Desire (2017), complies blue bromides from across the globe, and blue postcards featuring some of the selections are available for visitors to take home. Blue, in word and concept, can be stretched in so many semiotic directions. The blues are great, but they cast a sad shadow on the color as a metaphor in today’s English, which is further exacerbated by the minority status of the so-called blue states in the US’s broken political system. But blue is not so sad in other languages. One vivid example is the Polish expression for what we might call daydreaming: to think about blue almonds. It captures the futility of idle fantasy so well.

You can see the map, and much more, and there’s more to read at Hyperallergic.

19th Century Archaeological Rome Goes Online.

Rodolfo Lanciani’s photo capturing the discovery of the bronze statue of the Boxer (1885) (all images © Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte).

In 1885, excavations at Rome’s Quirinal Hill revealed one of the most celebrated Hellenistic Greek sculptures: the bronze, seated Boxer at Rest. Present was the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani, who witnessed its exhumation and snapped a photograph of the rare ancient object. The image he produced is as arresting as the sculpture itself, capturing the figure perched on a mound of dirt, like a time traveler taking in the ruins of a once-familiar world. It’s one of many photographs Lanciani captured of his city’s changing landscape, and it’s just one gem from his own, massive archives — amassed as his impressive effort to document Rome’s entire archaeological history through the end of the 19th century.

Nearly 4,000 records from Lanciani’s collection are now digitized and accessible through a new, online database created over two years by researches at Stanford University Libraries, the University of Oregon, and Dartmouth College. The Rodolfo Lanciani Digital Archive makes accessible about one fourth of the archive that ended up at the National Institute of Archaeology and Art History in Rome when the archaeologist died in 1929, which is available to the public at the Palazzo Venezia only during select weekday hours.

You can now browse through high-resolution drawings, prints, and photos created between the 16th and 20th centuries that show the many infrastructural layers of the capital. From watercolors of entire buildings to architectural plans to sketches of decorative elements rendered by hundreds of artists, the works reveal the city’s famous buildings at different stages as well as structures that have been lost to time.

You can see more and read all about this at Hyperallergic.