Art is the Solution

Puss in Boots Source: Wikipedia I’m told that today is National Cat Day, so I’d like to celebrate that with a particularly entertaining piece of cat art: Puss in Boots by Gustave Doré. Doré was a French artist who was best known for his illustrations of books and poems. He created this engraving of Puss in Boots to accompany the cat’s story in a book of fairy tales. The illustration depicts the character of Puss in Boots raising the alarm as another character drowns in the background; the original caption for the image read: "Help! The Marquis of Carabas is drowning." Although the engraving clearly displays Doré’s artistic skill (he was an acknowledged master of the woodcut-engraving technique), its true charm comes from Doré’s creative use of detail. The cat is resplendent in a pair of truly extraordinary boots, a necklace of bird’s heads, and a brace of dead mice hanging from his belt. The cat stands on two legs with an animated, almost human expression. Doré’s de...

Dragon (1892) Source: WikiArt October is the season of monsters. No Halloween celebration would be complete without guests dressed as vampires, mummies, and werewolves. However, my favorite monster is something a little larger and more fiery: a dragon. Fortunately, there is one artist who celebrates mythological creatures in all their glory: Theodor Severin Kittelsen. Kittelsen—a Norwegian artist—is well-known today for his paintings and drawings representing Scandinavian legends and fairy tales. His style is charming and whimsical, imbued with the spiritual and emotional fervor of the Romantic movement. Well, Kittelsen is especially well known for his drawings and paintings of Norwegian trolls, he also produced many illustrations of dragons throughout his career. The painting I’m featuring today depicts the skeleton of a dragon, made even more fearsome and terrifying in death. The desiccated corpse lays in a shadowed cave, surrounded by scattered pieces of gold and treasure, decorated...

Endpapers for Treasure Island Source: Brandywine River Museum of Art Yesterday, I discussed the work of American Artist Andrew Wyeth, so today I want to spend some time talking about the work of his father, N.C. Wyeth. N.C. Wyeth—the patriarch of the Wyeth family of artists—was both a painter and a rather famous illustrator in his own right, well known for his illustrations for books and magazines. I first encountered Wyeth’s work (unknowingly) when I read an illustrated version of Treasure Island when I was ten. Wyeth’s illustrations for Treasure Island are known as some of his finest work. Over the years, I read Treasure Island many times, and I recall those illustrations vividly. In fact, I have a print of the endpapers for Treasure Island hanging in my room. To this day, I have deep appreciation for the bold, realist style that makes Wyeth’s illustrations so effective.  "For all the world, I was led like a dancing bear" Source: Brandywine River Museum of Art ...

Spectacled Caiman and a False Coral Snake Source: Wikimedia Commons The boundary between art and science is often very distinct, but, in some situations the line can be blurred. While art is subjective by its nature and contains inherent bias, it can be a valuable scientific tool in that it provides a record of the artist’s experiences and observations (like a visual lab notebook). This is certainly true of the art of Maria Sibylla Merian. Merian was a naturalist who studied insects. Although her work touched upon other animals as well, she is best known as one of the founders of the field of entomology. Throughout her career, Merian published several books documenting the lifecycle of many species of insects, with an emphasis on the process of metamorphosis, something she studied in great detail. She produced hundreds of stunning illustrations to accompany these books, and (given the topic of this blog) those images are what’s most interesting to me.  Inflorescence of B...