More on Furaha at TetZooCon 2022

As usual there are many other things going on (nice ones, I'm happy to say!) so I am behind with blogging. But I do have some nice subjects almost ready, of which the one that must take precedence is the upcoming 'TetZooCon'!    

There will finally be a real live Tetrapod Zoology Convention again: TetZooCon 2022, on 3 & 4 December 2022! Have a look at the programme, which looks to be as fascinating, if not more so, than previous versions. If you like your biology mixed with some art and are not afraid to visit the outer regions of  biological disciplines, have a look. I have very fond memories of my earlier visits.

The art in question is 'palaeoart', meaning 'Palaeontological Art'. I have never written about Palaeoart before (or 'Paleoart'; I'll stick to 'Palaeoart' because I've set my spelling checker to the version of English closest to me, which happens to be British English). The simple reason for me ignoring palaeoart is that this blog is about the part of speculative biology that deals with life elsewhere, as reflected in the title 'Furahan Biology and Allied Matters'. I guess I could stretch the 'Allied matters' some more, and in fact I did when I showed my attempt at dinosaur sculpture. That doesn't mean I do not like Palaeoart; far from it! I love it. Palaeoart is blossoming these days, thanks to an explosion of interesting new discoveries that need to be depicted, and to a parallel explosion of talent all over the world. If you want to have a look at what is happening, please take a look at the book 'Mesozoic Art: Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals in Art' by Steve White and Darren Naish.

 

Click to enlarge; copyright White and Naish

I just received my copy and think it is excellent. Mind you, the two earlier books by Steve White on a very similar there are also excellent, with a large format and high printing standards: Dinosaur Art (2012) and Dinosaur Art II (2017).

There will be a Palaeoart workshop at TetZooCon, run by John Conway, as well as a Palaeoart Exhibition. I will show some Furaha prints there for only the second time ever. Mind you, when I learned about this exhibition, I wasn't aware yet that it was about palaeoart, so I applied, and now I realise that I am a sort of intruder there, showing work that isn’t 'palaeo'. Perhaps I should call it 'AllothenArt' ('Elsewhere') or PlagioArt ('Sideways'), but I don’t think those words will catch on…

The prints in question will show works, or versions thereof, that I have never shown in public before, apart for the exhibition in the Netherlands two months ago. So, if you are curious, you know where to go.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a painting for those who cannot come to London. It shows a tetrapter, with the common name 'Red Baron' ('Dicella Gampsonyx', meaning 'pitchfork with crooked claws'). As you can see, it is a highly derived Tetrapter with several predatory adaptations. The red wing spots tell you that this is a female: have a look at the illustration here. By the way, I am learning how to preparing to sell and send prints over the internet, in particular involving selling prints abroad and outside the EU.

Back to TetZooCon: there will be a roundtable discussion about 'Designing Aliens', chaired by Darren Naish and me, with Jennifer Colbourne, Joschua Knüppe, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Dougal Dixon. If you like biology, science fiction, speculative biology, or preferably all three, I think you are going to love this.

Se you there!

Furaha at TetZooCon 2022

In my previous post I mentioned that there would probably be a TetZooCon again and that Furaha would probably be there, but now I can tell you that it's going to happen. 

TetZooCon 2022 will be on 3 and $ December, 2022, In London. 

For more news, have a look at the following sites:

https://tetzoo.com/blog/2022/9/13/tetzoocon-2022-is-go

https://tetzoo.com/convention

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/646899722011712

Furaha at a Leiden Art Exhibition: 24 & 25 September 2022

 The following will mostly be of interest to Dutch readers: I have been asked to exhibit some paintings of Furahan lifeforms in an art gallery in Leiden, where I live.

The occasion is the 'Leiden Art Route', a yearly happening in which art galleries open their doors to present a variety of art. This year, the galleries open their doors on 24 and 25 September. I will be present in person to answer questions and to explain some of the background ideas during the afternoon of both days.

I was invited by Charlotte Lemmens, the owner of the Alien Art Gallery. That name tells you that my work should be right at home there. The gallery usually shows the work of Vincent Icke, an astronomer who uses his scientific knowledge to inspire his art. As I try to base my animal creations on biological science, our work has the combination of science with art in common. Personally, I think the two go well together, but I would think that, wouldn’t I, being a scientist.
       
The Leiden Art Route is organised by Museum De Lakenhal. Although the museum does have a website in English, the pages about the Art Route ('Kunstroute') are in Dutch only. Here is the page of the Art Route devoted to the Alien Art Gallery. Here is a specific page in the context of the Art Route about my work, in Dutch again.  

The Alien Art Gallery has its own page, also in Dutch, but you can see the work of Vincent Icke on its English page here.   

So there you are. The exposition represents a departure from my earlier stance on showing recent work. I had chosen to keep that mostly under wraps, wishing to keep the work fresh until the publication of The Book. However, perhaps a limited exposure will in fact help prepare the ground. I have produced high-quality prints of about 12 paintings; such prints will be for sale and can be ordered during the exhibition. There will also be a 36-page booklet, showing these paintings along with some of the additional illustrations and text written for The Book. This booklet is a much-abbreviated version of The Book, serving serves as a catalogue to the exhibition. It will also be for sale. But, as this is a local Dutch affair, 'The Booklet' is in Dutch, in contrast to The Book.     

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

As part of the PR process postcards were produced of four paintings. I added a text 'Greetings from Furaha', but in Dutch ('Groeten van Furaha'). You can see a stack of them above. The postcards are at present available free of charge in several book shops and at museum De Lakenhal in Leiden.   

Finally, to have something for speakers of English too, some other news. As things stand, there is a chance of a Furaha presence in London, next December. That would be the Tetrapod Zoology Convention (TetZooCon), but nothing is final yet! I will certainly announce any news about that here, but you may also read about it on the TetZoo blog. 

Back from TetZooCon

I am slowly recuperating from the TetZooCon event in London that took place on last Saturday and Sunday (that's short for 'Tetrapod Zoology Convention'). I had not been to a TetZooCon before, for the simple reason that the timing in October had always interfered with my work: October is a very popular month for all kinds of scientific conventions. But this time I had taken time off in October, and by pure coincidence TetZooCon happened to fall right in that period. I definitely will want to go to next year's TetZooCon. They're fun! I learned about whale population recovery, straight-tusked elephants, the influence of city lights on the biological clocks of birds, music in wildlife documentaries, and many, many other things. I expect that there will be a discussion of the programme on tetzoo.com, so I will not go into details here. I will just hint at one or two things.
  
I was very curious about the Palaeoart workshop. The programme stated talks by Luis Rey and Mark Witton, and there was a discussion in which John Conway and Bob Nicholls also took part. In this blog I have never devoted much attention to palaeoart, although I think it can fall under the heading of 'allied matters' in the title of this blog. After all, much of palaeoart is speculative, and in that sense it is part of speculative biology. Part of the discussion was about to which extent those who like art in general would also like palaeoart. Personally I doubt that: the admittedly little I have seen of the general art world suggested surprisingly closed minds, with some Art Schools not even deigning tot teach representational art at all. Do not even mention digital painting there; that seems to lie outside that particular micro-universe altogether. The discussion also dealt with the current preference for photorealism in palaeoart. Some of the photorealistic work done by experts in that field is stunning. But I grew up with the work of people like Zdenek Burian, who worked in a much more impressionist manner. The irony here is that, whenever I aim to do something in a Burian-like style, it always turns out much more photorealistic than I wanted to.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

That twist brings me to the workshop itself: John Conway asked the participants to produce palaeoart in an art style that would be new and foreign to the artist, challenging people to use materials they were otherwise unfamiliar with. I found that so much of a challenge that I missed the first 10 minutes of Luis Rey's talk altogether (sorry). In the end, I used pastels, even though I stopped touching crayons, charcoal and similar materials as soon as my school teachers allowed me to let them lie. I chose to draw a triceratops in the style used by Stone Age painters, using an Altamira bison as inspiration. The coarse effects of the pastel really fitted the subject matter well, which was more luck than intention.

On Sunday afternoon Darren Naish led a discussion about speculative biology, with Dougal Dixon and me as speakers. Dougal was his usual enthusiastic self and did very well. He had brought along a model of Greenworld (for posts on Greenworld see here and here), as well as many sketchbooks of Greenworld, that were laying on a table so everyone had ample time to browse through them during the conference. I showed a 15-slide presentation of Furaha that contained nine paintings that had not been publicly shown before, so I wondered whether people would pick up on those (so far, I haven't seen them pop up yet). Because this was just a quick introduction I did not provide much in the way of background knowledge.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a slide of a subject that was published before: it is part of the banner at the top of this blog, but the one here is a reworked digital version, while the one in the banner is still the old oil painting. Hexapods form the last group I need to do to complete The Book, taking up some 10 to 12 spreads. I am thinking of giving them a thorough makeover, with important changes to their jaws and leg structures.

I showed some animations that have been shown on these blog before such as the one above, but the bigger projection scale really helps. The one above is of course a short-cloaked cloakfish. Such animations take an enormous amount of time to make, and I had stopped creating them because of that. But one of the TetZooCons talks changed my mind: Fiona Taylor spoke about the music accompanying music documentaries, and made a very strong case that music adds to the image. So I will reconsider the feasability of creating a four- or five-minute documentary about cloakfish adaptive radiation one day after all. Perhaps there will even be a professional sound track. Don't hold your breath though, as producing even one scene takes an awfully long time...

Speculative Biology with Dougal Dixon (and me) at TetZooCon, London, 6-7 October 2018

Some of you may already know the Tetrapod Zoology blog written by Darren Naish. It has been hosted in various places over the years. It recently moved away from Scientific American to its own place, tetzoo.com. I recommend it to everyone who is interested in regular biology besides speculative biology. Actually, I suppose that everyone with an interest in speculative biology will also be interested in real biology. Darren regularly discusses speculative zoology too, by the way, so it's worth browsing through his earlier posts for that reason alone.

Click to enlarge

He also organises a yearly convention, the appropriately named 'TetZooCon'. I will simply quote from the TetZooCon pages to tell you what it is about:

Are you interested in animals, and specifically in tetrapods: that is, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, living and extinct? Are you interested in their evolution, biology and diversity, in their portrayal in art, literature and fiction, in the animals of the distant past, in conservation, cryptozoology, domestication and, frankly, in just about anything relevant to the world of tetrapods? If the answer is “Hmm, I’m not sure”, you might like to go away and do something different. BUT if the answer is “Yes”, have you heard about TetZooCon? 

That should do it... This year it will be a two day event, for the first time. Although I had my eye on that convention for some time, this year is the first time that my schedule allows me to go and visit it. I already knew Darren from the World Science Fiction Convention in London, LonCon3, in 2014. Now, one thing led to another, and rather than just sit in the audience I will take part: on Sunday, October 7th, Dougal Dixon and yours truly will discuss speculative biology from 1400-1500 hrs. Afterwards there will be an opportunity for book signing by Dougal Dixon.

I hope to see you in London!