My Andy Warhol Orangutan

While playing around with the 'open apple m' command in Photoshop today, I ended up creating a really funky looking image of an orangutan pastel I made a while back.

It reminds me of one I remember seeing a long time ago - painted by Andy Warhol. It's not exactly like his, but I think it captures the spirit of his style.

This morning I started what will become my morning "coffee break" routine. If this morning is any indication, I will be able to spend a useful amount of time every morning working on a primate pastel while I eavesdrop on the conversation of a bunch of guys who remind me of my dad and his friends.

It should be fun seeing how long it takes the staff and other patrons at my new morning place to know me.

Presumably, my usual businesslike demeanor will prevent unnecessary interruptions... which can be good and bad.

Because I can't wear my artwork, creating it in public will be one way people will see it locally - at least until I have enough of a collection to approach galleries! I think my work is destined for galleries and a book.

I think it is interesting to watch artists at work. Heck, I just think it's interesting to watch people period. Okay, not just people - social animals in general. So, by creating my work in public, maybe some time someone will come bug me after observing me for a while. I just might get to blab about primates, hand out my new business cards, and who knows.

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Want to learn about why orangutans have those huge cheeks? Read about them here.

Trunk Show Preview

I got invited to be part of a "trunk show" this weekend so I have been working like crazy to put together a one sheet "artist statement" that will introduce my cards, the price, and my purpose. I want this thing to double as an insert for my card packaging when I wholesale them. It will be what people read when they look at the "back" of the packaging and what will be on the table next to my basket of cards at the trunk sale.

What I wrote comes from my etsy store announcement so the real work came in laying it out. I don't know why I made my job harder by doing it in Photoshop; I guess I knew that by doing so I would learn new tricks. I did. But wow, doing layout and design in that program is a pain.

Some artist statements are vacuous and overly flowery. I wanted to avoid that. I think I succeeded.

Now I just need to size and print out the inserts for two different sized envelopes, print stickers for the backs of the cards, stick them, and stuff the envelopes. I'm thinking of also bringing my bookmarks and monkey pendants to gauge interest in them. Although I have sold every bookmark I've listed on etsy, listing them is a royal pain and the profit margin isn't so great, so I'm not inclined to list more of them if they can be sold in other venues.

I don't have any expectations about this trunk sale. In an ideal world I would make enough to buy a new sewing machine so I can start making monkeys again. Why monkeys when none of them has sold yet? They bring people in to my store :D and relisting the same old one isn't going to attract people who already recognize him. Plus, I need a break from paper.

Wish me luck!

Trunkt: The Buyers Guide to Art & Design Entrepreneurs

Trunkt is an online juried gallery where artists can display their work to the world free of charge. I don't know how much traffic it gets, or how selective it is, but many people on etsy swear by it. Evidently it's a compliment to be selected, it generates exposure, and eventually sales. It functions like an actual art gallery. So I applied one night when I couldn't get to sleep. And lo and behold, I was accepted! My embossed fall foliage cards are featured in the paper goods portfolio - right at the top. Many other artists have created online portfolios and most of it is well worth owning or at least looking at. It's also a great place to look for unique gifts to give this holiday season.

Your Opinion Wanted Now

I sculpted this little monkey out of black Fimo clay. She can hold one stick of incense in the little pot she holds in front of her belly.

She measures 1.5 inches tall & wide and about 2 inches deep.

Do you think people would buy these little guys?

How much do you think people would pay for them?

I'm thinking about changing the pot to a red heart to make them even cuter. Would that be an improvement?

Photoshop is Fab!

This morning I touched up the watercolor I did of the mediterranean street. I lightened the color which I think brightens the entire scene up considerably. I also got rid of two dog hairs (thanks Katy!) and fixed some of the bleed overs in the purple stone wall and the brown tower.






What a difference, eh?


You can't really see where I've touch up the bleed over, but you can in the larger versions.








I've penciled out the lines for my next watercolor - a Newfy surfing out to rescue someone. Attached to her leg by a rope is a lifesaver ring that trails behind in the wave. It's very cartoony and will have bright colors.

And I am fortunate to find someone who can be a mentor for me in my apps to TT (tenure track) positions at SLACs (small liberal arts colleges). She's agreed to look over my teaching and research statements to help me improve them. I only wish there were more openings! So far I've only seen one that I am excited about. It's at a top ranked small liberal arts college in MN.

Meet the Gorilla Sock "Monkey"

Yesterday I made a sock monkey gorilla while Sleyed sleyed the loom, or maybe he was warping it. In any case, he was in his studio while I was in mine. I started off making a camel sock monkey using one of Katy Newfy's toys as inspiration. Her toy is a Lamiedoodle. I'd take a photo of her camel lamie, but she's slobbered all over it making it look less than photogenic. You can get the idea from this photo I found by googling images of a new one.

So, I set off to sewing. I made the body and limbs first and sewed a little stub of a tail on. When I made the head I realized it was the absolute perfect shape for a gorilla, so the camel, which had a tail, became a gorilla mid way through the project.

Then I sewed on the nose, which I had in reserve from playing around with fabric earlier, so I spose since I had the primate nose already and didn't really feel like making a camel nose to fit on a gorilla's head that it was easy to just turn the little guy into a gorilla. What to do about that tail though??? Monkeys have tails; apes don't! I don't know how many times I have told students that and here I am making an anatomically incorrect gorilla!

When I sewed the ears on I screwed up big time. I made the cut in the wrong place, sewed the ear on in the wrong spot, stepped back and looked - totally asymmetrical in a seriously unappealing way. Her face was also smooshed on one side. Not cute. Well, I suppose if you don't mind that your sock monkey looks like she needs cosmetic surgery or was in some horrific motorcycle accident, I suppose she was cute.

I decided to cut the ear out and reattach it elsewhere. When I did I had to sew up the hole. Her face became even more catawampus. The ear eventually got on in a decent spot, but the poor little 'rilla ended up with a mooshed face on one side. I think she's still pretty cute. She's got some flaws, but hey "imperfections" in this lovingly handmade toy are a testament to her character!

A Watercolor Postcard

My latest creation is titled "If George Bernard Shaw Had A Newfy."
The saying on the card is a take off on one of Shaw's quotations.

Portrait of a Newf and other Art News

Here's my first stab at altering an image using Photoshop filters.


This morning I finished a watercolor painting that I actually started years ago, the first time I lived in this desert oasis. I think I started it in 1999.

I needed a mental break from sewing after the non-sock sock monkey experiment so I decided to paint something.

Painting is a totally different activity so it was sure to be just the thing I'd need to get refreshed.

I dug out my watercolor tablets and realized I had an unfinished painting that I had totally forgotten about. I can't say I was too thrilled to finish it, but I did. It's not my best work; the paint ended up being way too heavy, but here it is. Maybe it would make a nice fridge magnet once shrunken down.

Little did I know that it made me want to paint something else! So I penciled a sketch I will paint and share soon.

If all fails in the world of real employment, perhaps I can sell my art.

On those lists of 100 things you've done in life, like swim with sharks, stand on the Great Wall of China, etc. I always check off "sell a piece of my own artwork." When I was a kid, I'd spend a week each summer with my cousin Adam drawing Garfield. We'd go around door to door asking people if they'd buy our doodles. We made enough everyday to go down and buy penny candy (a lot of it!) from a little grocery store in the neighborhood.

Sock Monkey Portait

After failing to find colorful socks to make my own funky monkey sock monkey, I raided my supply of fabric scraps and made a non-sock sock monkey.

Like 99% of the other things I've sewn, I didn't use a pattern. The body and limbs were easy; I just made a bag of the appropriate size. The face and ears were also fairly easy. The monkey's head was challenging because I had to make several darts to give it shape. However -- attaching the cranium to the body was a complete hassle. That alone took as much time as all of the rest of the sewing because I had to do it by hand.

Everyone who makes sock monkeys (out of socks) says they are a cinch to make. I can understand why. They never have to attach the head to the body because the head is actually the toe area of the sock!

My madras print non-sock sock monkey is stuffed with fiberfill fuzz and lavender from my garden. I was thinking of naming him Mad Russ, but he looks too cheerful so we'll just call him Russ.

Uakari Monkey & The Origin of Blushing

It is said that humans are the only animal that blushes.

Uakari monkeys have bright red faces and are unusual among primates for it. But they don't blush. I don't know how anyone would be able to tell even if they did!

The evolutionary origin of their bright red faces is as about as big of a mystery as why humans blush.

One theory about uakari monkey facial redness is that it's a sexually selected trait associated with testosterone. A related theory says it advertizes health.

These neat-o small (9 pound) monkeys live in South America, really are that white (at least this subspecies), and are reputed to be monogamous.

Uakaris, along with bearded saki monkeys, might be the only primates other than humans that form large groups made up of monogamous pairs. These monkeys are NOT well studied so they may not actually be monogamous. The ARKive site has some really great footage of uakaris.

Blushing, like any other nonverbal behavior with communicative value, fascinates me both academically and personally. You see, seldom am I embarrased to speak in public; it's an occupational hazard after all, but, every once in a while a totally uncontrollable and horrible blush sweeps across my face, neck, and upper chest. I can feel my skin heat up, sometimes I sweat. What is weird is that rarely in such instances do I actually feel embarrassed, yet there it is blazing, bright freaking red, red, red. I even blush alone. I think it must be related to hot flashes, but I am way too young for that. To add insult to injury, I am incredibly pale-skinned, so even the slightest blush can be seen from afar, like the fire truck roaring down the street yelling at everyone to get the hell out of its way.

Bright red faces are not unknown in the animal kindom. Primates, and famously humans, become red with anger. Here the red signals, indeed, SHOUTS: Get away!!!

I would argue that reddened faces during anger make it possible for socially grouping animals to maintain those groups in spite of frequent conflicts which inevitably emerge whenever individuals must live together and use the same resource pool. Having a signal that indicates to everyone else that you are pissed off and which prompts others to get away from you protects everyone from fighting, injury and group disintegration.

Why we would show rage on our faces rather than some other part of the body intrigued Darwin, who wrote about that and the subject of emotion and facial expression in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. I love picking up the book and reading it but I find it incredibly frustrating because it is mostly (80% I'd say) descriptive with little evolutionary theorizing about why animals and humans have the facial expressions they do, including that of shame. Needless to say, in the last few days of pondering my impending unemployment, I thought about writing a textbook about nonverbal communication across animal species! I found out when prepping my nonverbal behavior seminar that there isn't anything on the market that does even a decent job of reviewing the relevant research. Much of what exists is pop-psychology rubbish.

But, back to the point. Rage and shame are not the same, but maybe both work to hold groups together. Darwin didn't offer up a compelling theory of why people, alone in the animal kingdom, blush. Perhaps, as he hints, it has something to do with us being one of the few species that has a self-concept. In order to blush, you have to know you exist independently from others. This is why humans don't tend to blush until about age two, right around the same time they "individuate" and realize they are not the same person as mom and dad. Congenitally deaf and blind people blush.

The one theory that Darwin presents and subsequently rejects in The Expression argues that the Creator (today we'd call it an Intelligent Designer) made us blush when we do something that violates the rules of our social group so that others will know we regret it. I like the theory a bit. Yet like Darwin, I think evolutionary forces made it so. If a signal makes others want to keep us on the island when we screw up, such a signal could evolve through natural selection. It could also have arisen through group selection, sexual selection, or random genetic drift.

You know what's interesting? The face becomes red and then we feel the heat from the flush. Thus, others see the signal before we even know we're blushing.

The World's Strangest Looking Monkey

Among the world's strangest looking monkeys is the snub-nosed langur, the species I chose for my third primate pastel.

Many monkeys, and this one in particular, bare a striking resemblance to our depictions of extraterrestrial beings, a coincidence noticed by feminist historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway, in her thought-provoking but dense tome, Primate Visions. If you're curious about the connection Haraway draws between primatology, cybernetics, and space exploration, her book is fairly reviewed by (male) primatologist Robin Dunbar here.

The golden or snub-nosed langur (rhinopithecus roxellana) is a rare species that lives in temperarate broad-leaf and coniferous mountain forests in southwestern China near Tibet. They live in huge troops which have been known to join up from time to time in bands that can contain to 600 individuals. This is very unusual for a primate species. Most live in much, much smaller groups.

Like many other "old world monkeys," the snub-nosed langur's basic grouping pattern consists of one male with 3-4 females and their offspring. Such groups are called "one male units" or OMUs, aka harems.

You can view photos and even video clips of this neat primate at a really neat website called Arkive.org. Check it out! It's really cool.

Orangutan Pastel

Here's my second attempt at a pastel - an adult male 'cheek padder' orangutan. I worked from a photo of an individual I believe is named Adik. Adik lives in Borneo and as you can tell from his cheek phalanges, he is a dominant male.

In Borneo, only dominant males develop secondary sexual characteristics such as full cheek pads, deep voice, and a huge size. Subordinate males who live in the dominant male's territory do not develop these traits. No knows quite why the so-called 'Peter Pan' males fail to develop. It may be stress-induced dwarfism or hormonal suppression possibly caused by pheromones emited by the dominant male. If the dominant male leaves or dies, the most dominant of the subordinate males in the area mature and become the dominant male with all of the associated physical characteristics. Orangutans are the only primate known to display two different coexisting adult male morphs. Of course there's a scientific term for it. It's called bimaturism, but some also call it arrested development.

Besides being physically stunted, the Peter Pan rangs might also be considered socially stunted. Females prefer to mate with the dominant males, so in order for subordinate males produce progeny they often resort to alternative strategies: rape or what primatologists call forced copulation. Females have evolved strategies for dealing with the threat of forced copulations. Lone females will travel to be closer to a dominant male. If she can't find one she seeks out other females. When no dominant male is nearby but a subordinate Peter Pan male is, females tend to stick closer together.

This is significant because orangutans are a solitary species. Fruiting trees are sparsely scattered in their habitat and don't come into season all at once so the habitat cannot support group foraging. Instead, rangs forage individually to be sure to get enough to eat and also leave enough to ripen for later. For females this artifact of habitat opens the door to being harassed by subordinate males. Dominant males rarely force copulations.

Obviously, one can draw some very interesting and provactive comparisons between humans and orangutans.


*** This pastel took a lot longer than the previous pastel I did on account of the time it took to put the tiny hairs on his face. I really like this one. I like how his eyes, nose, and lips turned out. I think he has a very typical orang expression.

My next pastel will be of a monkey without hair on its face. Candidates are: douc langur, snub-nosed langur, and bald uakari. I am leaning toward the snub-nosed langur because it has a very strange face - it's blue! Plus it is an incredibly rare species; I could not locate a single decent source to link to. The one I found contained plagiarized material.

My First Pastel - A Mandrill

This morning I made my first image with pastels - an 11 x 14 inch mandrill.

I've posted the scans I made of the work in progress because I think they look cool. The whole thing took about 5-6 hours with breaks. Next time I think I could save a lot of time by laying down a watercolor wash for the background before using the pastels.

I love pastels; it felt like painting. I had to remember to wash my hands after smudging before moving on to another color zone. Like watercolors, pastels are very forgiving. In time I plan to make a monkey series; I'm aiming for 12.

This afternoon Sleyed and I toured for-sale houses. We found several that had potential studios. One, maybe two, had enough space for a separate his & hers studios. Weaving on one wing and paper arts on the other! Trouble is, I won't be offered a position soon enough and we won't be able to sell our house soon enough to get the one we both liked the most. Someone else is sure to snap it up first. It's in the right neighborhood, the right size, has all new up-dated interior, nice landscaping, and a yard large enough to start a flower and flowering tree nursery. And, it's about $20,000 under-priced. Crazy.

Oh and a while back I blogged about how happy I was to find a replacement Le Petit Prince "book on tape." This morning while making my mandrill I listened to it and found out that the 60 minute recording included excerpts from The Little Prince and other St. X stories like Night Flight. Humpf! The entire thing was in French, which is what I wanted, but I did not want any other St. X stuff. My attention wandered so I'm not sure how the Little Prince portion ended; I'm not sure whether he actually died. I do remember the little guy meeting Le Renard, so at least one of my favorite encounters is in there. I will have to listen to it again. My French is not what it used to be.

Tomorrow I am going to attempt to boil my dissertation down to a 20 minute talk. I will not be listening to a book on tape in French in the background! While I find it slightly intimidating to narrow my defense talk down so much, I will just adopt the strategy I use for conference presentations and set it up more or less like one of my HBES talks. I like putting presentations together, so that helps! My defense is a week from this Thursday.

I think I will do another monkey pastel the day after and listen to my first Japanese lesson while I do it. I have got to get started with them. There are thirty 30 min lessons and I want to have all of them under my belt before I leave. I still have aboout 2 months but I know I will need to repeat lessons. That was my experience with Arabic so I assume Japanese will be the same. I still need to shop around for a good work book so I can learn to read and write a little. I really like being able to write.