Anis bulbs. Bulbos de hinojo

Based on an Anis salad I made myself.

Structure. Estructura

The organic and the Euclidean geometry together in a structure. The organic is below, providing a sense of physical instability. Besides, there´s an external agent affecting the system. Maybe it falls down...

Turkey 2 and 5. Pavo. Playing with negative space. Jugando con espacio negativo

Believe it or not, these paintings have a Thanksgiving turkey inside, surrounded by vegetables. But my intention was to exercise with negative space. Please go to my blog on Architecture and Urbanism and read about concepts on negative space to fully understand the idea.

Translucent robots. Robots translúcidos

Obviously inspired by Asimov´s Robots´ Novels.

Earthquake. Terremoto

“The mother weeps, the infant cries, the wild beast groans or roars, which is groaning, the tree shivrs, the grass shudders, the cloud growls, the mountain quakes, the forest murmurs, the wind complains, the bird sings. We are born, it is to suffer; we live, it is to suffer”

Victor Hugo. Postcript to my life. Postcriptum de ma vie.

Uterus with embryo. Útero con embrión

This digital painting is pretty explicit. The red symbolizes the blood that the mother spreads when the baby is born. The uterus is like a hard shell that protects the luminosity of new life. The embryo is floating in light that is, in time, transferred to the mother.

Possum lying in the marsh. Comadreja yaciendo en el pantano

This is a possum lying in a marsh with flowers, and it was inspired by all possums that die in the freeway everyday, this is an aesthetic way to show its death, instead of being smashed in the cement. This area is full of possums (comadrejas, zarigüeyas) and usually come to look for food, in consequence there are brave fights with dogs. At first, I didn´t recognized them as they are SO fat, huge, not like ours in the country, here, they live on the trash and whatever they can find in the Wetlands in front of the beach. One of them used to visit us and slept inside one of my plant pots, a small one, nothing would scare him (or her), it came to ruin my plants every night. This is my revenge.

Torres y puentes. Towers and bridges

Frutos cayendo. Falling fruits

Arabesques in symmetry. Arabescos en simetría

The red arabesques are shown to infinity. To explain this effect, nobody does it better than Edgar Alan Poe:

¨Some few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were in various stations about --and there was the couch, too --bridal couch --of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height --even unproportionably so --were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry --tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk.¨

From Ligeia. By Edgar Allan Poe. Published in 1838

Carnivorous plant trying to eat a bird. Planta carnívora tratando de comer un pájaro

City in the night. Ciudad en la noche

This digital painting is tricky and it´s influenced by my research on urban morphology. Seen from a satellite, the cities show areas of different colors with more density, usually called ¨urban sprawl¨ or in Spanish, defined as ¨manchas de aceite¨ (oil stains). In this case, the clusters appear to be in a desert land with spots of water, like some areas in Peru, for example. But the light color in the edge of the sea is tempting us to look at the picture as a ¨vertical¨ landscape, being the sea the blue, the stains with lighting an urban horizon, and the rest, a dark-brownish sky. We can read it both ways.

Hombre surfeando. Surfing man

The dots everywhere are the representation of marine foam all around the body, the board and sail, and its organicity is opposed to the rigidity of the figures.

Flower and leaves in a gobelin. Flores y hojas en un gobelino

Gobelin is a tapestry with this kind of textile. The name refers to the founding family of dyers, established in Faubourg Saint Marcel, Paris, SXV.

Círculo y cuadrado mostrando su interior. Circle and square showing their interior

A circle that has been projected inside a square. The circle is the square´s interior, but the circle has it´s own interior. A kind of Mamushka doll, but represented as a different concept.

The interior is irregular like the bowels inside a human body. Reason and chaos.

Fractal butterfly. Mariposa fractal

I´ve called this fractal a butterfly, this is what I see, butterflies inside butterflies. The basic fractal is a Newton.

The Newton fractal is a boundary set in the complex plane which is characterized by Newton's method applied to a fixed polynomial. In numerical analysis, Newton's method (also known as the Newton–Raphson method), named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a method for finding successively better approximations to the roots (or zeroes) of a real-valued function.

Read more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_fractal

I´ve generated this variation of Newton fractal from a Mandelbrot fractal, that you can see around the figure

Galaxy 2. Galaxia 2

¨Night is illimitable. Why is the world made thus? We do not know. In the midst of this darkness there are lights; what is the purpose of these lights? They utter the unspeakable. They illumine the invisible. They enlighten, for they resemble torches; they gaze on something, for they resemble the eye of man. They are terrible and charming. They are faint lights scattered through the unknown. We call them stars.¨

Victor Hugo: Postscriptum de ma vie (Victor Hugo´s Intellectual Biography)

Florcitas. Little flowers

Fossils in a rock. Fósiles en una roca

(Or two aliens kissing and embracing each other).

¨So leave us alone, Gentlemen, you are only usurpers. By what right do you claim to canalize human intelligence and award spiritual certificates of merit?

You know nothing of the Spirit, you ignore its most secret and essential ramifications, those fossil imprints so close to our own origins, those tracts which occasionally we are able to discover deep in the most unexplored  lodes of our mind.¨

From Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities. By Antonin Artaud.

Molinete. Windmill

Tombs. Tumbas

The tombs intertwined in the landscape. The rigid stone in combination with the softness of Nature.

Death is a fisherman, the world we see

His fish-pond is, and we the fishes be;

His net some general sickness; howe'er he

Is not so kind as other fishers be;

For if they take one of the smaller fry,

They throw him in again, he shall not die:

But death is sure to kill all he can get,

And all is fish with him that comes to net.

Death is a Fisherman. By Benjamin Franklin

Elephant woman crying. Mujer elefante llorando

Inspired in my short story La Mujer Elefante

http://theclubofcompulsivereaders.blogspot.com/2011/09/la-mujer-elefante.html

Huellas en la arena. Tracks in the sand

Tsunami

Goldbrown upon the sated flood

The rockvine clusters lift and sway;

Vast wings above the lambent waters brood

Of sullen day.

A waste of waters ruthlessly

Sways and uplifts its weedy mane

Where brooding day stares down upon the sea

In dull disdain.

Uplift and sway, O golden vine,

Your clustered fruits to love's full flood,

Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine

Incertitude!

Flood. By James Joyce

Árboles en el viento. Trees in the wind

 

¨There is the part of nature that we perceive, and there is the part of nature that we do not perceive.¨ Victor Hugo

Medieval City

The ruins. Las ruinas

When the last colours of the day

Have from their burning ebbed away,

About that ruin, cold and lone,

The cricket shrills from stone to stone;

And scattering o'er its darkened green,

Bands of fairies may be seen,

Clattering like grasshoppers, their feet

Dancing a thistledown dance round it:

While the great gold of the mild moon

Tinges their tiny acorn shoon.

The Ruin by Walter De La Mare

White cabbage. Repollo blanco

This is chicken wrapped in white cabbage. I cooked it myself and made art with it.

The X Files: I want to believe (in)... Los Archivos X: deseo creer (en)...

The image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot be born of a comparison but of the bringing together of two realities which are more or less remote. The more distant and just the relationship of these conjoined realities, the stronger the image -the more emotive power and poetic reality it will have.

Pierre Reverdy. Nord-Sud, March 1918

Broccoflower salad

Broccoflower is a commercial trade mark of a vegetable that is a combination between cauliflower and broccoli. I prepared a salad with it, took a picture and manipulated the image.

Triangles and a circle. Triángulos y un círculo

Inspired by "Propeller Island". Inspirada en "La Isla de Hélice¨

Propeller Island (also published as The Floating Island, or The Pearl of the Pacific) is a science fiction novel by French author Jules Verne (1828–1905). It was first published in 1895 as part of the Voyages Extraordinaires. A French string quartet, traveling from San Francisco to their next engagement in San Diego, is diverted to Standard Island. Standard Island is an immense man-made island designed to travel the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The wealth of residents of the island can only be measured in millions. The quartet is hired to play a number of concerts for the residents during their tour of the islands of the South Pacific.(Adapted from wikipedia.org)

I was a girl when I read the book and it was pretty boring to me, but now I have enjoyed the making of this digital painting based on this novel. Who can forget Jules Verne? From the whole book, the description of the propeller or helice, caused me a strong impression, maybe I didn´t understand too much what it meant. So, I took the theme, in old dark scale of greys as a reminiscence of the illustrations in the first editions.

This island reminds me the cities of Archigram, they could be anywhere.

Attack to a cube. Ataque a un cubo

This attack to the cube could be immoral for some people:

¨Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its approval upon Regularity of conformation: nor has the Law been backward in seconding their efforts. "Irregularity of Figure" means with us the same as, or more than, a combination of moral obliquity and criminality with you, and is treated accordingly. There are not wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral Irregularity. "The Irregular," they say, "is from his birth scouted by his own parents, derided by his brothers and sisters, neglected by the domestics, scorned and suspected by society, and excluded from all posts of responsibility, trust, and useful activity.¨

Edwin A. Abbott. Flatland. A romance of many dimensions. With Illustrations by the Author, A SQUARE.1884

Structure in Wetlands. Estructura en terrenos bajos

Jungle series. Junglas

Two versions of the same idea. Vegetation below, and the light trying to pass through the forest´s darkness.

Bees. Abejas

Two bees are inserted on a bigger one, from which we can only see part of its silhouette in the background. The oval represents an egg, and it´s repeated in two, one per each bee. Insects that were born from the Queen.

The square cells emphasize the rigid geometrical construction; but colors are melt to soften the Euclidean geometry.

Square cells. Celdas cuadradas

¨YOU, WHO are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually see an angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a Circle in the happy region of the Three Dimensions - how shall I make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one another's configuration?¨

Edwin A. Abbott. Flatland. A romance of many dimensions. With Illustrations by the Author, A SQUARE.1884

Newton and Mandelbrot fractals variation. Playing with perception. Jugando con las percepciones

Reflex. Reflejo

This is a fractal originated from a combination of Newton and Mandelbrot. The formula:

Z=Fn1(Z); Z=Z-((Z^6+Z^5*Z°-Sin(Z)+P1)/(6*Z^5+5*Z^4*Z°-Cos(Z)))+Z°

Not seen as Julia, inverted. Function: CLog

I´ve selected the darker color above to make it more unstable; psychologically, it bothers us to see  the ¨heaviest¨ above, just imagine a construction with solid concrete on top of glass. It can be done, but we shall feel affected. To compensate, I left the dark reddish ¨liquid¨ penetrating in the clear area. It relieves us to imagine that the figure will find equilibrium one day.

A bright version with the formula

Z=Fn1(Z); Z=Z-((Z^6+Z^5*Z°-Sin(Z)+P1)/(6*Z^5+5*Z^4*Z°-Cos(Z)))+Z°

Both figures carry a kind of Manierism. They look symmetric, but they aren´t. This last one also carries a strong tension between the horizontal and vertical lines, which is interrupted by the round ¨butterfly¨, which is not exactly in the cross center. Also, I´ve chosen the whole composition displaced from the center, to break the aparent symmetry.

Pájaro Siniestro. Sinister Bird

¨Further inquiry brought me meager but fascinating news of an island on that lonely coral reef, called Isla de la Muerte (the Island of the Dead). Here was the haunt of a strange bird, called by Indians rabihorcado, and it was said to live off the booby, another strange sea-bird. The natives of the coast solemnly averred that when the rabihorcado could not steal fish from the booby he killed himself by hanging in the brush. I did not believe such talk. The Spanish appeared to be rabi, meaning rabies, and horcar, to hang.¨

Zane Gray. Tales of Fishes. The Island of the Dead. USA. 1919

Ave Fénix. Phoenix Bird

¨In the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a rose bush. Here, in the first rose, a bird was born. His flight was like the flashing of light, his plumage was beauteous, and his song ravishing. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, when she and Adam were driven from Paradise, there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub a spark into the nest of the bird, which blazed up forthwith. The bird perished in the flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one—the one solitary Phoenix bird.¨

Hans Christian Andersen. The Phoenix Bird. 1850


My homage for the reconstruction and the continuity of life. September 11, 2001, I´ll keep the date in my memories. In black and white, no colors in memoriam.

Carnival games. Juegos de carnaval

This is a fractal that I generated from a Newton one. Pretty colorful I called it ¨Carnival¨, because it reminded me the serpentines and the foam that falls on us in minuscule dots. Then, I added more elements to the party plus bright color.

Though it was getting dark at night, we still can see the power of light and color

And at last, it was only a single mass of bodies, serpentines and foam in the streets of nowhere town.

Fish. Peces

Fish Collage

Been to Avalon with Grey ... been most everywhere;

Chummed with him and fished with him in every Sportsman’s

lair.

Helped him with the white Sea-bass and Barracuda haul,

Shared the Tuna’s sprayful sport and heard his Hunter-call,

Me an’ Grey are fishin’ friends.... Pals of rod and reel,

Whether it’s the sort that fights ... or th’ humble eel,

On and on, through Wonderland ... winds a-blowin’ free,

Catching all th’ fins that grow ... Sportsman Grey an’ Me.

From the poem Zane Grey. By W. Livingston Larner. 1919

Pines in Spring. Pinos en Primavera

¨Lo, here a CAMERA OBSCURA is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life!—if thou art perfectly at leasure for such trivial amusement, walk in, and view the wonders of my INCHANTED GARDEN.

Whereas P. OVIDIUS NASO, a great Necromancer in the famous Court of AUGUSTUS CAESAR, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions; and have here exhibited them before thee.¨

Erasmus Darwin. The Botanic Garden. Part II