South Netherlandish rosary bead, 2" in diameter, 1500-1510.

This week I learned about a species of ant whose entire colony is contained in a single hickory nut!

Image from here, at the Cloisters.

I can't stop thinking about this movie.

Tom Uttech, Nind Awatchige, 2003.

Tom Uttech's paintings slay me. They were in the American Art Museum's show about birds. He also takes photos!

Tom Uttech, Nin Nissingwam

In 1990, Gabriel García Márquez interviewed Akira Kurosawa. Here's a little bit.

García Márquez: Can you remember any image from real life that you consider impossible to express on film?

Kurosawa: Yes. That of a mining town named Ilidachi, where I worked as an assistant director when I was very young. The director had declared at first glance that the atmosphere was magnificent and strange, and that’s the reason we filmed it. But the images showed only a run-of-the-mill town, for they were missing something that was known to us: that the working conditions in (the town) are very dangerous, and that the women and children of the miners live in eternal fear for their safety. When one looks at the village one confuses the landscape with that feeling, and one perceives it as stranger than it actually is. But the camera does not see it with the same eyes.

Sometimes I question my life because of a comic book. These pages are from Daisuke Igarashi's Little Forest. (Read from right to left.)

I didn't take many photos this month, but I did get to rewatch my favorite movie.

Oh, Mosfilm has the whole movie online with subtitles! Part 1, Part 2. Mirror is there, too. If you watch it, my advice is to put the movie on full-screen and give it your undivided attention. Yi Yi: A One and a Two was also great.

 

Horse chestnut tree
torn hole
stitched around the edge with grass stalks
moving in the wind
Trinity College, Cambridge
24 July 1986  

Andy Goldsworthy

The bad news... in the middle of triumphantly scanning all that film, my scanner started acting weird. It's not under warranty any more. So, I whittled an egg in frustration. My first little whittle.

Update: The scanner was an easy fix!

Keisuke Tanaka's Pieces of Mountain, 2008.

Pillar Of the World, 2006.

Goal, 2006.

Spore prints!

From Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky's artist book 339 Gräser. Cool!

They did a show inspired by Brooks Hall! the site of my first art class at UVa and other adventures. Anyway I love everything about this.

Brooks Hall sometime between 1877 and 1940

Ruffin Hall sometime between February 24 and March 30

"Seeking a focus that combined diverse artistic styles, Burckhardt was inspired by U.Va.’s former natural history museum, which occupied the gallery of Brooks Hall from 1877 to 1940. The result is an installation called 'The Brooks Natural History Museum, c 1900: A Creative Interpretation.' The main attraction of the original Brooks Hall museum was a plaster model of a woolly mammoth, constructed by the naturalist Henry Ward. This artifact is the inspiration for the exhibit’s centerpiece, 'Wilma,' a full-size replica who gently shelters a bust of Ward between her cardboard tusks."

When the Ob River was dammed up in the 1950s to build the Berdsk Reservoir, much of the old city of Berdsk was submerged, and some villages, too. I've been working in Berdsk this year! Here are some maps. I found the first one here.

John James Audubon, Great-footed Hawk

John James Audubon, Wild Turkey

John James Audubon, Spotted Grous

From The Birds of America, 1827-1838. Lots more here.

Ernst Haeckel, Actiniae

 

Ernst Haeckel, Basimycetes

More here.

Shows like this make me excited to be alive!

The Great American Hall of Wonders at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Seeing Is Knowing: The Universe at Carleton College's Perlman Teaching Museum
In the Company of Animals at The Morgan Library & Museum

Collage?

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky
Ruth Van Beek

Textworks by Richard Long.

I asked my good friend Kat if I could link her website, and she said yeah! She is a sensitive and grounded person with a good imagination, and she inspires me to try and see things more thoroughly.

Kathleen Carey Hall, Girlfriends

"Photographs of British Algae by Anna Atkins (1799-1871) is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means."

"Atkins employed cyanotype to record all the specimens of algae found in the British Isles. The first part of her work, entitled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, appeared in 1843; by 1850 she had produced 12 additional parts. During the next three years, Atkins completed the publication with 389 captioned photograms and several pages of text, of which a dozen copies are known. In 1854, Atkins, possibly collaborating with her friend Anne Dixon, produced an album entitled Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns. Despite the simplicity of her means, Atkins’s project was the first sustained effort to demonstrate that the medium of photography could be both scientifically useful and aesthetically pleasing."

Pictures from New York Public Library. Some text from here.