Needle Felting to Remember Old Friends

I recently finished a needle felted project for a coworker. A friend of hers lost a Maine coon not too long ago that she wanted to commemorate. Happily for my sake, she decided on needle felting. This was not the first lost kitty I had made for someone, so I knew exactly how to start: by studying pictures. I wanted to get a sense of the kitty's demeanor and a very good image of all of his markings. Below are some of the photos she provided me of Willie, the sweet dearly departed.

How sanguine he looks:

I once had the privilege of owning a Maine coon and remembered what relaxed and easy going rag dolls they are, so I opted for a posture that would reflect this well-known and loved attribute of the breed. Willie clearly shared it.

I tried pinned roving for the white fur. Unlike regular roving, pinned roving has been lightly spun into chunky loose threads. Since fluffy textures can be hard to achieve with needle felting, I thought it might help to get a long-haired look. It did, but in retrospect I might work the pinned roving a little less and refrain from felting as many of its fibers, leaving the ends to hang down. This would make the doll inherently less durable, but as long as it's made for shelf-sitting and not for playing, I suppose that works.

By the time I finished making Willie, I also realized I had his proportions slightly off. This comes from his Maine coon-ness as they have such long, large bodies. I made him too short. Additionally, the roving I bought for Willie's markings proved too orange. Still, I think he turned out well. My coworker and her friend liked him, so he succeeded where it matters.

Book: Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer

In a recent post, I spent a good deal of time discussing how ancient Egypt receives a disproportionate amount of popular attention as far as classical history goes. And then I promptly began reading a novel by Norman Mailer set in ancient Egypt. I learned about Ancient Evenings (and a number of other extremely interesting books) from a post by Wilfried Houjebek on the original and worthwhile site SpaceCollective. Houjebek describes it this way:

 [Ancient Evenings] is the autobiography of a Ka, the lowliest soul of the seven souls of the ancient Egyptians, which makes for unusual reading. Especially because Mailer uses an uncensored version of Egyptian mythology which, to put it mildly, differs from the version you get of it from the National Geographic. The Egyptians practised sex magic with the stamina of a bonobo. Mailer makes Aleister Crowley look like a prudish schoolboy. This is the boldest attempt to recreate a radically different mind from ours that I know of, and does so successfully.

Strangely and despite my bellyaching about all of the historical attention paid to ancient Egypt, reading this novel has underscored how seldom ancient Egypt has been explored in fiction. Science fiction has adopted Egypt as an aesthetic treasure trove from which to draw tropes and visuals (much like fantasy has used the Middle Ages), but fictive explorations of historical ancient Egypt remain scarce. Ancient Evenings in this respect certainly provides a thrill on par with Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's cinematic rendering of the pre-Columbian Mayan civilization. For reasons best known to the 100,000th author to set a novel in Victorian London, we rarely get to place ourselves imaginatively in certain more neglected places and periods. It is a treat to go along with an author or filmmaker while they portray these lesser attended worlds and their inhabitants.

To work, this kind of venture requires at least a gesture towards the detail and methodological sophistication of an adept historian. It is not sufficient to project one's modern sensibility into a premodern time period; neither is it useful to envision all precursors to our modernity as quainter, rubish versions of ourselves. That kind of shortsighted anachronism seems clunky and unconvincing even when applied to time periods much closer to our own (a great - by which I mean rather dreadful -  example of this is One Thousand White Women). The author undertaking such a project ideally realizes that past cultures operated not just in different material worlds than we do, but within truly foreign paradigms and cosmologies. The cultural assumptions upon which they based their value systems, their ideas of self and of the world depart radically from our own. When executed with sensitivity, such a project demands not merely sound research but a real shift of one's entire epistemological framework.

I think Mailer understood this and attempted it sincerely. He not only spent a good deal of time researching the world in which he set this novel, but his narrative choices exhibit an awareness that ancient Egyptians viewed the world and humans' place in it in a profoundly different way than do we. Their minds were not our minds. It took Mailer 10 years to complete Ancient Evenings and, without being an expert on ancient Egyptian civilization, I can offer that every time I looked up a reference which seemed either farfetched or peculiarly well-imagined, a factual basis existed for it. I have actually become so curious regarding the breadth of Mailer's research that I procured a couple of academic histories about ancient Egyptian society and culture. I expect by reading them to form a more complete opinion concerning Mailer's level of scholarship and authenticity* in portraying ancient Egyptians, but I suspect it is rather high.

Authenticity and historical imaginative responsibility aside, the book possesses other artistic merits. Mailer has given the novel a story-within-a-story narrative structure reminiscent of The Thousand-and-One Nights.  As indicated above, we do begin with our protagonist Menenhetet's ka, or vital spark - that essence which distinguishes the living from the dead - as he awakens in an Egyptian necropolis and realizes he is dead but cannot remember who he was. Slowly, Menenhetet's ka recalls himself and, soon, meets the ka of his namesake great-grandfather. The story moves across generations, telling the story of the elder Menenhetet's four previous lives, and involves tales of charioteers, concubines, and priests, embroiled in wars, palace intrigue, and religious rituals; and yet, through Mailer's careful emplotment and through the almost supernatural connection of his ancient Egyptians to each other and to their own history, the reader gleans a coherent narrative from the maze. In contrast with The Thousand-and-One Nights, the story-within-a-story structure of Ancient Evenings supplies a feeling of unity rather than the Arabian tale's feeling of disjointed rabbit-holing.**

The most self-contained narrative episode of Ancient Evenings relates the story of the deities Isis and Osiris. But again, while discrete, this story adds much to the arc and cohesion of the novel as a whole given the centrality of deities to daily Egyptian life (and so, to Menenhetet's lives). The tale of Isis and Osiris introduces the reader to the main players in the Egyptian pantheon and also offers a good example of the gods' vacillating powers, aspects, and associations with one another. This information proves useful as we crawl into Mailer's well-realized, and highly religious, ancient Egypt. It also begins to inure us to the litany of sex acts, detailed descriptions of which we will have to wade through in order to make it to the end of this 700plus-page book.

Mailer does a reasonable job of linking sex to some sort of spiritual alchemy. Most Bronze Age cultures situated procreation and fertility, metaphorically and actually, at the center of their religious mythologies and rituals. Mailer's ancient Egypt reflects this. Sex comprises an exchange of power, equal or unequal depending. The sexual activity of the pharaoh, indeed all of his physical experiences, are tied to the land itself and to the vital cycles of the Nile. Sex can establish something like a psychic link; although in general Mailer's Egyptians are capable of hearing each others' thoughts and even seeing each others' memories. In short, sex certainly has a relevant place in the world of Mailer's story. Nevertheless, the endless (if inventive) sex scenes made me feel half like a baffled and enthralled, probably giggling, child nervously flipping through a pilfered porn magazine; and half like a bored adult, scoffing and rolling eyes, because I have actually had sex and now these images do not feed my curiosity, but seem superficial and disappointing.

I do not here lodge any accusation of rank sexism at Mr. Mailer, nor am I calling Ancient Evenings pornography. I have formed the distinct impression that Mailer truly used, or felt he used, his depictions of sex to communicate the centrality of sex-as-act and sex-as-metaphor to the spirituality of ancient Egyptians. That is, he does not treat his descriptions as gratuitous and I believe he meant by them to reveal how open and un-tabooed Egyptians behaved with regard to sex. Mailer's sex scenes tend to punctuate if not always further the plot. The sex he describes does not only involve bodies, but egos and psyches as well. Additionally, he references most types of sex imaginable: between men and women, men and men, women and women, people and animals; participants range from two to the hundreds (seriously, you have never seen battle depicted like this); oral, anal, manual and anything else you can imagine occurs; he portrays sex as it demonstrates (for both sexes) love, lust, domination, curiosity, rage and friendship; sex for Mailer's characters can yield shame, elation, or insight. As with actual sex in the actual world, the meaning all depends on context and participants.

In this way, I would not call Mailer's use or depiction of sex sexist. I am, however, tempted to call plenty of it juvenile. Mailer definitely crafts female characters with more agency than round-mouthed blow-up dolls, but the drives of their sexuality still seem to mimic the drives of men. They use sex the same way men do; they want the same things...ahem...thing. Compiling a list of Mailer's euphemisms for the penis would yield a monotonous, if periodically amusing, read. And this goes back to the feeling I kept getting while reading the novel; that I was, in fact, peeping at girly magazine.  Ancient Evenings is not like porn insofar as it has a higher purpose than portraying sex for titillation. It is exactly like porn insofar as it is so profoundly phallocentric as to seem frequently comical.

The male member is described, referred to, manipulated, named, and prized to a farcical degree by Mailer via all of his characters. Women and at least one of their erogenous zones are not ignored certainly, and some female characters (only the most powerful and goddess-like, however) are more three-dimensionally drawn than others, but female sexuality as a whole in Ancient Evenings retains the unidirectional telos and raison d'être of porn: it's all about the cock.

True, many modern portrayals of sex, pornographic and otherwise, echo Mailer's phallus obsession. It is possible that ancient Egypt simply resembles our own time and place in this respect, but I rebel against this thought. I find the omnipresence of phallic symbols as fertility symbols very believable, but I assume Egyptians would know and employ other symbols as well and that female symbols of sexual power might also engage their sexuality. Ancient Evenings is an otherwise well-imagined portrayal of a people for whom the powers-that-be appeared more sexually balanced than strictly patriarchal, and who validated women's sexual appetites (and so, I dare to hypothesize, understood and even indulged them). It would have been refreshing to read about a group of women who do not behave as though they were reared on the assumption that their own sexuality exists primarily for the use and pleasure of men; or that their sexuality mirrors, in perfect inverse, that of men.

Observing the many-columned Temple of Hatshepsut, Pharaoh Ramses II says to the elder Menenhetet: "Only a woman would build a temple with nothing but cocks". (278) And there is no satire in this comment, no inkling of a minor truth that women learn when still little girls and continue to observe as the boys they know become men: many, many males are fascinated by their own dicks and project this fascination out into the world (and on to females) with an astounding lack of self-reflection. I suggest, only a man would imagine a woman would build a temple with nothing but cocks.

*Whatever "authenticity" may mean in this context.
** Small wonder given the folkloric and oral provenance of The Thousand-and-One Nights; I intend no criticism of that amazing work.

For more reviews visit me at Goodreads.

Solvin' Mysteries, Swappin' Ornaments

As usual, the holidays have provided many distractions to the ebb and flow of daily life, but with no traveling planned it has proven more relaxing than my average Christmas season. A friend of mine has a longstanding ornament-swap shindig every year in December. This year her theme was "peacock diva". When she had a hard time finding something she liked that fit bill, I was extremely tickled she thought to ask me! 

I immediately found a hair decoration that featured many small but peacock-like feathers and began designing the "diva" portion of the ornament. It is probably no coincidence that she turned out kind of deco-y since I was knee-deep in the first season of Poirot at the time. (Here's a picture of David Suchet because he's awesome and he likes my ornament.)

I made her out of oven-bake clay, painted her with acrylic paint and then attached the feathers with a regular craft glue. I think she turned out pretty well:

Greeting Cards and Winter Fests

Left is an image of the Yuletide card I recently painted. Not being Christian, I feel like a fraud saying Merry Christmas (this is also why I say "Gesundheit" to a sneeze rather than "Bless you" -- it's the little things), so this time of year I usually opt for Season's Greetings. In this case, I wanted to go with some medieval-ish themes so, using my rusty Latin, I came up with an approximation of what a medieval Latin speaker might say should he want to wish someone the season's greetings. Any true Latin scholar will probably find something immediately wrong with my little phrase, but not being a true Latin scholar I choose not to concern myself too much on this point. Latin words in gold paint look cool. I also did a little research into pre-Christian European celebrations of the winter solstice and discovered that our word "yule", which now refers generally to Christmas time, originally referred to the pagan Scandinavian and northern European winter festival "Jul". Christian conversion came late to this portion of Europe and so many of of Jul's trappings became associated with Christmas, including the name. I picture bayberry, thistle and stylized oak leaves (with the rounded tips of the European variety), a wren, a fat little robin and a squirrel (again the European red variety with tufted ears). A limited number of digital prints are available at The Celery Museum on Etsy.

In addition to completing this small painting, I have received a few commissions for artwork: an ornament and two needlefelted cats. I look much forward to hunkering down this Thanksgiving and working on these projects. The weather here in subtropical New Orleans promises to be strangely warm and, for the first time in 5 or so years, I am not traveling anywhere for either of our two big winter holidays. I could not be happier. I will certainly be posting between now and Christmas but perhaps only sparsely, so Consalutationes hiemis to all! Unless you actually know Latin, in which case Season's Greetings! May you not shop yourself into debt over a holiday meant to honor a poor man of integrity superimposed upon the pagan celebration of winter solstice!

Book: Mesopotamia by Gwendolyn Leick

As with music, clothes, technologies or any other commodity sold to and consumed by the public, history (as a field of inquiry) possesses its own fads and flavors of the month that help determine which scholar gets funding for which project and, consequently, which historical topics end up getting play in the classroom, in books, in museums, in films and, eventually, in the public eye.  A famous and long-lived example of a history fad is Egyptology.

In 1798, Napoléon Bonaparte led French troops to Syria and Egypt in an attempt to disrupt British access to India.  In about a year he would stage a coup and, as self-proclaimed First Consul (his last step before becoming emperor), he envisioned himself rivaling the luminary rulers of Europe's past: conquerors like Alexander the Great and patrons of culture, like Charlemagne.  Perhaps already thinking these vainglorious thoughts as he left for Egypt, Napoléon brought a host of scientists along with his soldiers.  These men, through painstaking observation, recording and no little plundering of Egypt's antiquities for France's (and soon, Britain's) museums, would essentially create the modern archaeological and historical field known as Egyptology.

For a fascinating online exhibit of this expedition see here.  Additionally, the magazine Archaeology recently released an enthralling special issue about ancient Egypt, available for sale here, which opens with an article about Napoléon's expedition and its influence on Egyptology.  (Below, the famous painting by Antoine-Jean Gros depicts Napoléon and his forces behaving imperially and generally acting like jerks to Egyptians in their own country.)

As information about and artifacts from Egypt poured into Europe care of Napoléon's busy scientists, the Western world - in the midst of relishing its own imperialist sense of cultural "superiority" over others - quickly grew enraptured by such an obviously advanced and culturally rich empire.  This love affair has waned only moderately.  Egypt still dominates the public's understanding of and captures most of its interest regarding ancient cultures.  Only ancient Greece and Rome, younger civilizations by thousands of years, exceed its popularity in the Western public discourse.  When it comes to envisioning the world of three to six thousand years ago, most of us can conjure images of Egyptian culture: cartouches and scarabs, pyramids and mummies, sumptuous grave goods of gold and lapis lazuli, hieroglyphic writing, we know the names of pharaohs and even some of their faces, we recognize many Egyptian gods.  Egypt seems familiar to us and appears to the popular imagination as a glittering civilized society isolated in a figurative and literal desert.

But this impression is wildly inaccurate and primarily a function of the disproportionate attention we have paid to it.  Egypt achieved the wealth it did, a wealth that allowed its cultural flourishing, through savvy exploitation of its own resources, but also through trade with other cultures and, occasionally, through conquest of other cultures, whose resources it then commanded.  The full grandeur of ancient Egypt did not burst fully formed from a hunter-gatherer culture or even a nomadic herding culture.  Its urbanized society developed over time in connection with similar developments in rather far flung regions.  In fact, civilization and complex societies abounded during the Bronze Age.  While scholars know increasingly more about these other civilizations contemporaneous with ancient Egypt during its long history - from Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley civilization, the Elamites to the Minoans, and so many others - it is still far easier, as a layman, to learn about Egypt than about any of these other cultures.  Due to the aforementioned age of and faddishness surrounding Egyptology, there are more books, more articles, more documentaries, and websites about it.  

As a fan of underdogs and history alike, I decided it was high time I remedy my own ignorance of extra-Egyptian Bronze Age cultures.  Ancient Egypt is fascinating, but what was happening elsewhere when the pharaohs were large and in charge?  I chose to begin with Mesopotamia because: (a) it developed socially complex urban civilization before Egypt did; (b) I couldn't envision a single component of its aesthetic sense as a culture; (c) the nation in which I live is currently messing about in Iraq née Mesopotamia with a degree of insensitivity and hubris that demonstrates utter ignorance of the area's history of cultural sophistication, not to mention its experience in coping with foreign invasion; and finally (d) the B-52s were right, before I talk I should read a book.



I did some scouring of online bibliographies and read many reviews until I alit upon Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick.  An anthropologist and Assyriologist, Leick does a deft job of summarizing the history of archaeological work on Mesopotamian cultures, explaining past and present analyses of  artifacts, and charting the waxing and waning of five millenia of Mesopotamian cities.

The first detail to note is that "Mesopotamia" describes a region defined by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which today encompasses Iraq, parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran.  Below is a map showing the region roughly corresponding to ancient Mesopotamia (in the pale ivory) and the modern national boundaries (black lines).  If your Middle East geography is poor and you do not know which country is which, you can educate yourself here.

For almost 5,000 years Mesopotamian civilization flourished along the Tigris-Euphrates river system.  Settlements became cities proper as the populations grew, inhabitants began year-round organized agriculture in surrounding areas, trade increased, and small "chapels" became ziggurats (religious temples dedicated to individual deities around which grew cults that became integral to Mesopotamian power structures).  Each city with its temple complex and associated priestly class functioned as what we may call a city-state, originally independent of one another but maintaining alliance networks.  Eventually, with the rise of kingship, individual cities began exerting themselves over others, using military force, exacting taxes, administering land use and generally bringing larger areas encompassing additional cities within their rule.

Several groups of people comprised what we think of as "Mesopotamian culture".  The first to become urbanites were the Sumerians from southern Mesopotamia, who founded one of the oldest cities in the world, Eridu, in 5400 B.C. and invented one of the earliest forms of writing, cuneiform.  ["Proto-cuneiform" pictograms on a clay tablet pictured below, probably from the 4th millenium B.C., and cuneiform proper pictured below that, from the 3rd millenium B.C.]

The Assyrians, a Semitic people from northern Mesopotamia, assumed kingship of the region during the 23rd century B.C.  Excluding a brief resurgence of Sumerian power, the kingship of Mesopotamia would reside with the Assyrians and the related but distinct Semitic peoples, the Akkadians and Babylonians, until the 6th century B.C.  Much like Latin in medieval Europe, the use of Sumerian as the language of letters outlasted Sumerian political dominance.  Akkadian, Aramaic and other languages would eventually work their way into Mesopotamian correspondence and record keeping, but these languages would continue to be written using Sumerian-developed cuneiform and Mesopotamia would remain recognizable as a geographical region with no little cultural cohesion, especially as regards the link between kingship and religion.

Mesopotamian kingship relied on the sanction (or perceived sanction) of a given city's main god or goddess, housed in a central and increasingly grand ziggurat.  Some of the most noteworthy and powerful of Mesopotamian deities include Enki (Akkadian Ea), Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar), and Marduk.  It was not uncommon for would-be kings to attack an existing capital, destroy its main temple and carry its idol off to a new capital.  Such thefts were thought to demonstrate the disfavor of the deity toward his or her former residence and approbation of his or her new home.  For example, more than one Assyrian king removed Marduk from his main temple in Babylon, thereby sealing conquest of the southern kingdom and effectively moving the seat of Mesopotamian power to the northern Assyrian capital city, Ashur.  [André Caron of Maquettes Historique created the truly badass reconstruction of Marduk's ziggurat, Etemenanki, below.  Caron's reconstruction represents Etemenanki as it looked when rebuilt (and enlarged) during the 6th century B.C., centuries later than the last theft of the statue but the model is too cool not to include.]

Interestingly, Marduk's eventual return to Babylon was likewise meant to legitimize the rule of the king affecting it; the determination of history apparently being that he never should have been removed in the first place.  In general any new ruler, and especially an ethnic, geographical or linguistic outsider, would seek to justify his rule by selectively destroying and/or endowing temples of the then-dominant Mesopotamian god or goddess.  The choice to destroy rather than endow was always an iffy one as Mesopotamians and their gods had long memories and an affront to a deity could always end up viewed as heresy.  A destruction or theft (as in the case of Marduk) could be revenged decades or even centuries after the original outrage, so strong was the intertwined meanings of god, city and king. 


In addition to a nuanced understanding of Mesopotamian religion and kingship, Leick gives her reader the impression of Mesopotamia as a diverse, adaptable and sophisticated culture that maintained diplomatic and trade connections with empires as far afield as Egypt, the Hittites (in Asia Minor) and the Indus Valley civilization (on the Indian subcontinent).  Mesopotamian internal power struggles, between kings, priests, usurpers, etc., took on a political complexity to rival Rome's, Constantinople's or even that of the Ottomans, replete with murders, plots and poisonings.  Mesopotamian wealth and cultural elaborateness, visible in its art, literature and architecture, also rivaled that of other great empires, not least of which being Egypt.  During the 14th century B.C., the Assyrian king of Mesopotamia, Ashur-uballit I even sent a letter to the Egyptian pharaoh Amenophis IV asserting his equality of status with the pharaoh, referring to him as "brother" and demanding gifts (such was the traditional exchange between rulers of equal status).  Mesopotamia was no small fry in the Bronze Age ocean.  [Impression from a 3rd millenium B.C. Akkadian cylinder seal, below.  To glean an appreciation of the craftsmanship at work here, understand that cylinder seals stood only between 2 and 6 centimeters high.  The image of the impression below as it appears on a computer screen is probably larger than the actual impression.]

[Also from the 3rd millenium B.C. is the so-called Standard of Ur, below.  Inlaid with shell, limestone and lapis, it was found among other grave goods in a king's tomb unearthed near the Mesopotamian city Ur.  The Standard, too, is smaller than you might think, standing only about 9 inches high.]

So powerful was Mesopotamia in its day that it figures prominently in the foundational documents of western civilization, though we seldom acknowledge it.  An historically-minded reading of the books of the Bible will reveal who, during their composition, were the major players in the Middle East because these polytheistic nations enter the Judeo-Christian story as the main foes and harassers of monotheism: namely Egypt, Mesopotamia and, eventually, Rome.

Indeed, most of what has come down to western popular imagination regarding Mesopotamia hails directly from the Old Testament in which Mesopotamian civilization constitutes a powerful villain and symbol of excess.  Biblical stories, for instance, have rendered "Babylon" popularly synonymous with decadence and hubris.  The "Tower of Babel" refers to a Mesopotamian ziggurat, perhaps to Etemenanki pictured above, although a good case has been made for its identification as the ziggurat of Eridu as well.  The Biblical "Nebuchadnezzar" is the Neo-Babylonian king, Nebuchadrezzar II who, in fact, did capture Jerusalem and destroy its temple.  [He also rebuilt Etemenanki in the 6th century B.C. and erected the "Ishtar gate" at Babylon, which has been reconstructed at Berlin's Pergamon Museum, pictured below.]

Additionally, the Babylonian captivity of the Jews certainly refers to a standard Mesopotamian practice of exporting conquered peoples to various parts of its empire.  Even older cultural memories of Mesopotamia surface in scripture as well.  Genesis refers to four cities founded by Nimrod in the land of Shinar.  Shinar probably refers to Sumer and the named cities to Sumerian cities: Babel (Babylon), Erech (Uruk), Accad (Akkad), and Calneh (possibly Nippur though scholars have offered other locations).  And the foregoing is just a brief sampling of biblical references to this great civilization.

Of course the image of Mesopotamia one gleans from the Bible (as with Egypt and Rome) is hopelessly, if understandably, skewed against it.  The Bible was written by and for people conquered and oppressed by these larger, more powerful civilizations.  Small wonder a nuanced picture of them does not emerge from scripture.  And yet in the case of both Rome and Egypt, other sources have ameliorated our impression of these empires, acknowledging their excesses but drawing attention to their achievements.  We, as Westerners, remain interested in Egyptian and Roman history for we feel they are somehow precursors to our own civilization and, I hypothesize, we see some of ourselves in them.

As I wonder why Mesopotamia has received shorter shrift in Western pop culture over the years, I shun the idea that its modern incarnation as Iraq has much to do with it.  Our ignoring of its ancient past predates either of the Bush boys' adventures at playing cowboy in that region.  If anything, our miserable war may have educated us just a bit more about this foundational culture of which we are all inheritors.  [U.S. soldiers visiting the partially reconstructed ruins of the ziggurat at Ur, below.]

For more reviews visit me at Goodreads.

In the Garden of Bead-en

My SPCA Paws on Parade design, Garden of Bead-en, is finished, photographed and delivered.  Here are a host of pictures of his many different angles and details. I can't wait to see where he ends up!

Of Challenges Met and Puffy Fake Animals

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about a public art project that I was about to undertake.  I had a very short time in which to complete the painting of a giant fiberglass bead dog.  I am proud to report that I finished ahead of schedule, am fond of the job I did, and have been asked to submit a second design sketch -- so I could be doing this all over again in a few short weeks!

Below are some pictures of the painting in progress, in rough order of how I worked.  We transport the beast this coming Friday, at which point Nicholas will graciously take some photos of Bead-en finished and in full daylight, frolicking in our courtyard, right before we load him in a U-Haul and cart him across town.  I will post the photos of the finished work next week.  (As always, the biggest thanks imaginable to Nick for the pictures and for not only staying cool about this guy taking over our living room and my life for two weeks, but for helping me put him there!)

First things first.  I primed him and then applied my base coat.  I used Kilz primer (excellent tip, Mom!), a mixture of good quality exterior house paint and artist's acrylics with good color-fastness mixed with a GAC medium that further increases color-fastness and adherence.

I had to turn him on his side many times during the process - eventually adding a little throw pillow for his huge head so as not to scuff the paint.  Early on, I worried most about my deadline, but the dog's shape eventually posed the greatest challenge.  As I mull over designs for a second dog, I am definitely taking this difficulty into account: how to create another detailed and visually interesting design that does not require doing detail work in the crevices of his bead necklace and in between his rotund legs, etc.

The live oak tree on his right flank took the most time of any one component.  I anticipated this and knocked most of it out first.  If I do a second dog, I will definitely keep this strategy.  Do what sucks first when enthusiasm's highest. 

You can see below my one real screw up - albeit a fixable one.  Two of the beads on his necklace were meant to be leafy tufts at the end of tree branches.  I got going too quickly and, before I had matched up my paper design with the three-dimensional object in front of me, I had painted the wrong set of beads green.  The green bead furthest from me in the photo below had to be re-primed and base coated.  Not much extra work, but enough to annoy me right when I felt like I was hitting my stride.  It brings to mind a carpenter's mantra I learned while working in a theater scene shop in college: "Measure twice, cut once."  A good reminder if I undertake the painting of another dog.

And here's a couple taken from each side while he was about half way finished:

And a few of some of my favorite details.

Here he is nearly finished, when all I really had left was lots and lots of black outlining.  Sometimes I rue myself for developing this habit of outlining everything, but I love how it looks visually.  It makes me think of medieval European art, Latin American religious art and my favorite periods of Disney film animation.  I gotta do it.

 

Finally, the big guy receiving his UV protectant spray coat.  Note our courtyard cat, Piglet, in the background.  We have five such indoor/outdoor felines and the presence of this strange, hulking object in their living room has definitely wigged them out the past couple of weeks.  I think they have only just come to fully rely on his being inanimate.  They will be glad to see the back of him...and horrified if I bring another one into their lives!

Beads and Dogs and Public Art for a Good Cause

Back in late 2010, the Louisiana SPCA issued a call for artists' proposals in connection with a fundraiser they titled Paws on Parade.  Following the public art projects of previous successful fundraisers, the SPCA proposed to match sponsors with artists who would paint fiberglass bead dogs.  A bead dog is a little trinket you can make by twisting a section of Mardi Gras beads in a certain way:

Only the dogs envisioned by the SPCA are about 4.5"x3.5"x2.5" and designed to be erected in front of buildings or in parks or anywhere else appropriate for public art.  My design, which I entitled Garden of Bead-en, made it past the first round and, in February 2011, I attended a function to match artists with sponsors.

Then I waited.

In fact, I waited so long I assumed that no sponsor had chosen my design and that I was out of the running.  But just last week, I heard from the SPCA.  While I do not have a sponsor as yet, they have commissioned me to paint a dog with my design in a short 16 days so that it will appear at another upcoming SPCA event, the Howling Success Patron Party and Gala and help promote the Paws On Parade fundraiser (and hopefully get me a sponsor).  I picked up the big guy yesterday (with the indispensable help of Nicholas - thanks Nick!!!) and gave him a coat of primer last night.  I am nervous and excited to tackle such a large project in so short of time but I have received much moral support from friends and coworkers and am quite fired up.  Bead-en currently occupies our living room, large and in charge.  I will post more pictures as I work on him.

A British Guy in the Bushes and a Flightless Fruit Namesake

I have a thing for nature documentaries.  I love watching animals, contemplating the variety of life on our planet, discovering the specificity of adaptions to certain habitats, and learning about places I will probably never visit.  In this regard, the naturalist David Attenborough figures as a prime purveyor of the docu-crack I crave.  He is pictured left, looking quite dashing in some earlier time period.  Although that Attenborough wrote and presented some fairly orientalizing, colonial-sounding narratives back in the day: see, A Blank on the Map, for example.  It's hard to hold it against him given the date of the film and his later work, but I still prefer the more mature, but no less dashing Attenborough pictured below, always peeking through bushes and spying surreptitiously on magnificent critters.

This Attenborough is responsible for countless sensitive and informative documentaries.  One of my favorites is The Life of Birds.  It has become one of my favorites precisely because I never expected it to be.  I had never counted myself overly fascinated by birds.  I came upon the film one day when, seeking a nature documentary fix (on my streaming service that shall remain nameless), I found it was the only one I had not already watched.  Boy was I wrong about birds.

The Life of Birds consists of 10 episodes, each of which attends either a specific aspect of birdhood (like flying or egg-laying) or distinct characteristics of certain kinds of birds (i.e., birds of prey, seed and nut eaters, etc.).  Each episode hops all around the world, taking in the truly mind-blowing array of avian life our planet supports (or is capable of supporting when we don't fiddle too much with habitats, as we are wont to do). Attenborough has occasion in a number of episodes to visit New Zealand, the island nation* that gives us a hint at what the planet may have looked like if birds rather than mammals had been ascendent after the extinction of the dinosaurs.  (Map showing New Zealand below in relation to Australia and the rest of the islands of the South Pacific.)

Human beings did not discover the existence of New Zealand until the thirteenth century.  This means that for tens of millions of years - since New Zealand broke off from the supercontinent, Gondwana - the only non-native (i.e., non-Gondwanan) creatures inhabiting New Zealand swam or flew there.  No large mammalian predators lived on the island until humans arrived.  In addition to its unusual isolation, New Zealand possesses varied ecosystems, from dense low-lying forest to sparse alpine mountain tops.  This feature has contributed greatly to the biodiversity of the island in general and to the multiplicity of its bird-life specifically.   

Among the breath-taking varieties of birds that call New Zealand home is the famous kiwi.  In addition to being (a) obviously adorable and (b) a renowned and easily recognized symbol of New Zealand, the kiwi is a unique and intriguing bird.  It belongs to the group of birds known as ratites, flightless birds that originated on Gondwana.  Living ratites include the African ostrich, Australian emu, South American rhea and New Guinean cassowary.  New Zealand used to be home to the large and in charge family of ratites known as moa (one of the  species known as Megalapteryx pictured below).  The largest species of moa could grow to reach 11 feet tall and unlike the other ratites I have mentioned, including the kiwi, the moa did not retain vestigial wings of any kind.  The prevailing theory is that humans hunted them to extinction by the 1400s or so.  Nice going.

All of these ratites tower (or towered) over the diminutive kiwi, which is about the size of a chicken.  However, one arena in which the kiwi excels is egg-to-body ratio.  I have found information indicating that the female can lay an egg anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of her own body weight.  Holy mackerel!  Additionally, the kiwi is nocturnal, eats worms through its tube-like beak and runs pretty fast.  Run, kiwi!  Don't go the way of the moa!  (Because, of course, kiwis are endangered.)

I became taken with this small, unique bird and was hankering for a needlefelting project.  Additionally, one of my oldest friends sent me a lovely moss agate pendant she made and I wanted to send her something handmade in return.  So my needlefelted kiwi project was born.

I ran out of brown wool, so his body is not nearly as large and roly poly as I intended.  I also made his legs out of clay-covered paperclips and, with the felted layer of wool on top, they turned out larger than I intended.  These exaggerated extremes led me to go the cartoony route and give my kiwi big googly eyes.  I like how he turned out.  Funny and cute but kind of awkward, much like the actual bird and, well, like many of us.  He is currently flying through the mail destined for his new home in the Pacific northwest. 

*I will refer to New Zealand as an "island" though it is a nation composed of many islands.