Small things

Here's one I made simply because I wanted to.  (You have to do things for the sheer joy of it every now and then or else you cut the nose off your practice.  We can talk much more about that later if you want.  Maybe in the pub.) Anyway the plant is a tiny Rhododendron lapponicum from Saana fjell.  A lovely thing, the leaves are aromatic when you stroke them,  I believe the leaves and flowers are sometimes used for tea, read a bit more about it on this nice site if you like.

The plant is protected here so no casual lopping off branches for dinner or specimens.  And as Saana is a sacred mountain you might want to be especially respectful of all its life forms anyway.  A person who wants to interview this plant here might to lie down on the fragrant mountain for an hour or two in the sunshine, patiently listening, making drawings and taking photos, trying not to trample.  You don't feel at all sorry for me for this, do you, and nor should you.

 It's about 3½ cm high as you can see ...

 or, if you like, here's a hare-shit for scale:

(Ok the bunnies are pretty big around here...

I think this is a Lepus timidus the arctic hare, with her big white feet.  I took the photo at midnight from my bedroom window.)

Here's where my rhododendron grows:

Still some snow:

I befriended this very nice mousey-type living nearby who consented to be photographed in exchange for sharing my cheese sandwich (don't worry, good black rye-bread, very healthy.)

Up here the moss grows taller than the trees

the plants huddle close to each other

the rocks appear greenish because they are covered in lichen.

It's a very nice journey to the top:

Painting with eukaryotes

This time I'm making paint for muticellular organisms...

Ha ha, that's right, humans, lovely, fantastic humans.  This is from a wee course in 'Winter flowers in egg tempera' at the Botanics.

 It's a very procedural business, you have to prime and gesso your own boards and then mix your pigments with your egg yolk and then get to grips with how to use the paint, which isn't quite like anything else.
If you want to know how to do it,  Koo Schadler is excessively good at it and generously shares her how-to expertise here.
We were doing this sort of thing:

I'm fond of doing this as it involves plenty of old-fashioned craftsmanship which is great for slowing down the thinking and making you focus on what kind of picture you think you want to make.  There's a lovely textility to the work, the paint is applied in lots of translucent layers of small brushstrokes so you get a very lively surface which is nice, the pictures look still from a distance but close-up are full of the joyful seething animation of everything as it cavorts about its business.
This really isn't for the vegans! There is something both creepy and glorious about the organism-ishness of the thing you make, with its wooden support, and its rabbit-skin glue colloids, and its boney, chalky ground, and its fatty eggy skin.

©Annie Barton

What are we doing here at the Botanics?  These classes are marketed as opportunities to "develop your skills and abilities", the idea being that students used them as a basis for follow-up work later on, if they wished, or simply enjoy them as a sort of hardcore way of having quiet fun.  So they have to function as 'leisure' or 'hobby' activities and be transformative-educational at the same time.  I've been wondering, what is the difference between 'leisure' and 'culture'? *

Why might the world need an enlarged dissection of a cycalmen in egg tempera? Who knows. But there you are, it's got one now, and it'll have to make of it the best it can.

One of the great things about this medium is that because you use food to make your paint, you are viscerally aware of the consuming nature of doing your doing. Especially as you use the yolk for the work, and the white for stiing in the fridge not being made into meringues. But help is at hand with  Marvellous Egg-white Dispenser, in the form of Blue, my wonderful studio neighbour's wonderful pal.

*The answer to that of course is; "If it's done by youngish men, then it's certainly Culture, and if it's done by older women, then it's certainly Leisure."

It's all stamens and no style.

Here's a picture of home studio corner today.  Note the fabulous jug of Goo, which had contained my bog myrtle specimens in some sphagnum and peaty muddy water so it would feel at home -  had to take the specimens out to dry out but I can't bear to throw out the substrate in case there are marvellous life forms lurking in there.

Anyway today we're looking at the flowers of the marvellous Vachellia cornigera or Acacia cornigera or bullhorn acacia . There's my specimen in a jar behind the paintbox.

So the nice yellow rockets are the inflorescences, and each of these individual tufts is a flower. Hundreds of them.

Very very small, and slightly sticky, though inclined to jump into outer space if you come at 'em with a scalpel. Can't say I blame them.

Thing is, there are hundreds of the male parts, but I'm buggered if I can find the female parts. Look! And that's the tip of my scalpel blade there, so you get a sense of how big they are.

That little brown effort there at the top is some sort of dysfunctional ovary, I think....

and finally, a wee pod.  I went through a large part of that inflorescence and only found five or six amongst a hundred or thereabouts, whatever is going on there probably accounts for the very small fruit to flower ratio - you can see the fruits on this herbarium specimen from Kew.

Some jolly sketchbook guff for your viewing pleasure. I got very interested in thosesmall brown cups in between the flowers, I think they are probably trichomes of some sort. They start out as fishy scales covering the flower buds;

and persist on their stalks as trumpet-shaped structures after the flowers fall off.

The first attempt at a posh version of the dissection. I used a dip-pen with paint in it for the fine lines, which just weren't fine enough.

Traditional tiny paintbrush fared much better in the second attempt. Also ultramarine violet for darkening the yellow, very nice, made for lovely soft granular greys.

Soundtrack for today is TWiM #73: Eyeing Root Nodule Development , delightful to listen to although a bit disrupted by the Leith Emergency Services Symposium: "Coping with the Consequences of Poverty, Discrimination, Disenfranchisement and Alienation" which takes place outside my window every now & then. Happily I think everyone walked away from this one.

Some lovely flowers: a 'complex composition'.

This is Ranunculus ficaria "Brazen Hussy", Narcissus tazetta "Minnow", and Primula polyantha "Dawn Ansell" all getting up in each others' shit.

It was my submission for the 'complex composition' module of the Dip. B.I. course last year. It was around this time I was finally able to articulate the devastating truth that there is absolutely no way I will ever ever be able to make anything remotely as nice as anything that actually grows, but that that was ok because I might eventually make a nice job of having a lovely dialogue with things, which might be more to the point anyway.

It was a kind of dry run of how to think about putting live material together in a convincing way - along the lines of Durer's "Great piece of turf",  using pretty flowers instead of an ecologically coherent bunch of specimens.  I was never a massive fan of the horticulturally beautified plant in general before this (compared to my beloved weeds) but spending that month or two looking at these delightful plants was an opportunity to think in a more nuanced way about our instrumental relations with other organisms. In fact the plants themselves are just as full of their own life-force as any other plant or for that matter you or I.   fact they are genuinely superior beings, though perhaps superior only to me, I can't speak for you, or the other plants. In fact the celandine and the primrose are even cheerfully surviving the dingy Leith winter in my tenement shared garden, whose soil is composed of heavy clay and the rubble from the outside lavvies that were only replaced by indoor ones in the 70's. Most of the rest of us are looking a bit battered and peely-wally at this point in February round here.

Hip hip hippophae

I'm looking at the lovely Hippophae rhamnoides or sea buckthorn, marvellous plant. 

 Here's the studio and the hopeful beginnings of the big painting I'm making.

"Why did you feel you needed to make a painting that you had to climb into it to paint it?",  I hear you ask.

Well, for these reasons:
 • So that I had to climb into it to paint it.
• So that I could represent its jolly spreading shrubby habit.
• So that I didn't have to make a lonely-looking isolationist-individualist representation of another   
  being.
• So I could chew on the fabulous mind-boggling fact of the many meristems (growing tips) at my       leisure
• So I would have to spend lots and lots of time painting and thinking about this plant.

Those aren't all reasons, are they, they are a pile of motivations between reason and just stuff I wanted to do.

 Here's some sketchbook guff.

The 'crystals on fruit' turn out to be peltate trichomes - hairs shaped roughtly like umbrellas. Would it be Wrong to use sparkly paint in the name of Science, I asks myself....

Ahh, more nodulations with Frankia bacteria on the roots.

An extra-large detail here in case you're as fond of the immersive stuff as I am. Click on it for a big view.  If you want.

The arrows here are pointing to mistakes, things that will have to be sorted out and put to rights.

This is quite good for me at this stage, there's nothing really horrendous going on here. For now anyway.

The arrows here are pointing to mistakes, things that will have to be sorted out and put to rights. Plenty time to totally ruin it later!