Cornelius Mazurka once conducted a seventy-five-piece consort of brassmen and hadros in Ruhmsburg. For many years he lived in a partially collapsed tower of the ruined bridge over the Jubila River.

He remained among the ruins living a hermit's existence, along with his dinosaur partner Henriette, after most citizens fled from the city. He maintains a collection of antique instruments, though no one plays them but himself.

During their journey to Chandara, Arthur Denison and Bix convince him to pack up his instrument collection and leave the city so he can start life again.

Naturalist Joe Hutto, who raised a flock of imprinted turkeys, says that they are extremely smart and aware communicators.

“But their ability to understand the world goes much further than just communication. I came to realize that these young turkeys in many ways were more conscious than I was”

Dinotopians enjoy a mini parade to celebrate a new hatchling.

How they found out Carlson was drinking on the job in Solar Corp’s Quad 28.He's drinking a home brew of Banisteriopsis caapi from the planet Xenon.

This background painting is from the Ralph Bakshi / Frank Frazetta animated movie “Fire and Ice.”

To create the painting “Thermala: Alpine Hideaway” I needed some reference for the lighting.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2024.

Did the colors mostly fade away to gray? It's caused by a neural adaptation that reduces your attention to a non changing stimulus. This happens because:

"the neurons in the visual system beyond the rods and cones have large receptive fields. This means that the small, involuntary eye movements made when fixating on something fail to move the stimulus onto a new cell's receptive field, in effect giving unvarying stimulation."

Source: Wikipedia on Troxler's Fading

Thomas Cole, Youth, from Voyage of Life, oil on canvas

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) lived less than a decade after the invention of photography, but he already recognized what a game changer it would be for his fellow artists. He assessed the impact when writing to a friend:

"I suppose you have read a great deal about the daguerrotype. If you believe everything the newspapers say, you would be led to suppose that the poor craft of painting was knocked in the head by this new machinery for making Nature take her own likeness, and we have nothing to do but give up the ghost . . . This is the conclusion: that the art of painting is creative, as well as an imitative art, and is in no danger of being superseded by any mechanical contrivance."

I wonder how he would respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by today's art-generating machines.

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Quoted from the book: The Painter and the Photograph

Ray tracing and path tracing are both techniques used in computer graphics to simulate the behavior of light.

Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929) was a Polish symbolist painter.

This leviathan is a variation of my larger sea monster painting. In this one I wanted the viewer to see the head of the creature first and then to glance down and take in the unfolding disaster.

In the larger version, I thought I could make the viewer would feel more involved and unsettled by having the body of the beast moving through the foreground. The tradeoff is that we're farther from the destruction.

The Famous Artist School marketed its correspondence course with print ads and direct mail, but also with these video ads in the 1950s.

[フレーム]

It's an establishing shot from the Bakshi / Frazetta’s animated film Fire and Ice, cel vinyl paint, 11x14”

In 1983 I did this oil study of the sculpture of Menelaus Carrying the Body of Patroclus (also known as Ajax Carrying the Body of Achilles). This sort of grisaille copy is fairly commonplace in today's Bargue-based ateliers, but I was working in a vacuum because the contemporary atelier movement had not yet developed.

I had left art school and set up my own curriculum because nobody on the art school's faculty seemed to know anything about the academic method. I found my answers in books. One of the most useful books was "The Academy and French Painting in the 19th Century."

The author Albert Boime points out that there were several goals of academic copies, ranging from technical to almost spiritual. The practice was far more than a superficial exercise. Yes, I was learning about light and form of course, and deepening my understanding of gesture and anatomical form and composition.

But it was more than that. By copying the masters of the Renaissance and of the Greek and Roman period, I felt as though I entered a deep sympathy with them that I didn't feel from just looking at them. Classical musicians understand this sympathy, because to play Beethoven or Mendelssohn well, you don't just play the notes. You have to try to understand them and enter their mind.

Unfortunately not all art students are encouraged to copy, so they don't get to share in this enriching practice of mind-melding with great artists of the past.

Warrior Woman, an oil painting for a paperback cover, plus one of the tone paper studies I did for it.

Playing a little here with lightening and unifying the tree masses to make that dark shadow shape stand out. Gouache, 5 x 7 inches.

Verdi's Otello, sketched from Parterre Box 27, Seat 1 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

In Thomas Couture's 1873 painting "The Thorny Path," four men struggle to pull a cart driven by an angelic figure.

According to the Philadelphia Art Museum, the image is Couture's satire on the decadence of French society during the 1870s. They note that the carriage is pulled...

"...not by animals but by four male captives who represent different ages and states of society. The naked old man leading the procession is flabby from indulgence; the troubadour following him, a symbol of young love, parodies the medieval ballads popular in nineteenth century France. The old soldier bends his head in self-reproach, and the young student writes as he walks, symbolizing the educated nobility's ignorance of the realities of daily life. The thistles and thorny plants along the road suggest the painfulness of their journey. The decrepit figure seated at the rear of the carriage with a bottle of wine in her basket foreshadows the courtesan's future. Finally, Couture signed his initials on the stone figure at center, which seems to be laughing at the entourage."

Couture developed an alternate version set in the open plain with the city in the distance.

When I need a model, I set up a mirror and some charcoal paper, and I draw.

With a wig and a costume and a scowl, I can be anybody—in my imagination at least.

During a break I forget to take off the wig, much to the amusement of FedEx man, who chooses that moment to come by the house.

The final painting appears as a gatefold in Nintendo Power magazine to promote the game Dinotopia: Timestone Pirates.

(Link for more info.)

For the retro enthusiast, cassettes are the best way to listen to a audio dramatization because they're so portable and fun to use, and they remember where you left off.

Am I listening to the sermon? Well, sort of. I'm monitoring the droning sound with half an ear.



But really, most of my conscious attention is devoted to understanding the amazing weaving of those French braids. She tells me later that she wove them all by herself by feel, without even looking in the mirror.

Aren't humans amazing?