Looking at the importance of art in astronomical sciences
I’d like to point to a recent article from Undark by writer Mara Johnson-Groh, looking at the way that artistic visualization methods have been important to ...
All posts tagged with art
Link: Field Museum Native American collection
This is an important article in Chicago magazine, “An Artist Addresses the Field Museum’s Problematic Native American Hall”. The article is a review of a new...
Link: The beauty of invasive species
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is running an article by Carolyn Beans that profiles the work of Ellie Irons: “Science and Culture: Painting ...
Link: Remembering a dinosaur dictionary
I really like this post from Matt Wedel, reminiscing about a book that made a big difference to his start on the path toward paleontology: “The New Dinosaur ...
Photo: An early Neandertal life rendering
One of the earliest artist renderings of a Neanderthal (1887), published in a magazine called The Open Court, which was dedicated to the dialogue between rel...
Atxurra cave art discovery in Spain
The Guardian reports on a recent cave art discovery in Spain: “Spanish archaeologists discover cave art to rival country’s best”.
Photo: Neandertal engraving in Gorham’s Cave
From my trip to Gibraltar last week for the 2015 Calpe Conference, a photo from deep within Gorham’s Cave of the famous engraving from Mousterian layers attr...
Link: Touring the new facsimile of Chauvet
Smithsonian Magazine sent Joshua Hammer to tour the new facsimile recreation of Chauvet Cave, which is called Caverne du Pont d’Arc: “Finally, the Beauty of ...
Eagle talons may be the earliest known Neandertal ornaments
Davorka Radovčić and colleagues have published a new analysis of eagle talons from the faunal assemblage excavated from the rock shelter at Krapina, Croatia ...
Link: National Geographic ancient art article
National Geographic dedicated part of its January 2015 issue to the origin of art. The longread article by Chip Walter is now available online: “First Artist...
Link: Photographing Chauvet
In Proof, the National Geographic photography blog, Stephen Alvarez describes his experience photographing the famous cave art of Chauvet Cave for the Januar...
Coding artistic influence in design space
The Physics ArXiv blog serves up the kind of art-science intersection I usually link to: When A Machine Learning Algorithm Studied Fine Art Paintings, It Saw...
The art of Homo erectus
Josephine Joordens and colleagues describe the utilization of freshwater mussels by ancient humans at Trinil, Java. The Trinil fossils were recovered by Euge...
Notable: Ancient rock art from Sulawesi
Notable paper: Aubert M, Brumm A, Ramli M, Sutikna T, Saptomo EW, Hakim B, Morwood MJ, van den Burgh GD, Kinsley L, Dosseto A. (2014). Pleistocene cave art f...
Donatello, the ancient Egyptians, and homolateral pose
A clever article by Rose Eveleth for The Atlantic looks into a peculiar regularity in the history of art: “Nobody Knows What Running Looks Like”. Eveleth rev...
A profile of John Gurche
The Mail and Guardian has a nice article about the work of John Gurche, written by Sarah Wild: “The next best thing to a time machine”. Gurche is doing a gue...
Profile of artist Ray Troll
Ray Troll is one of my favorite artists. His woodcut-inspired illustrations of the creatures of deep time, especially focused on sea creatures, combine scien...
Shadows of ancient firelight
Zach Zorich has written an interesting article for Nautilus, about the optical illusions caused by firelight flickering across parietal art: “Early Humans Ma...
Chauvet Cave: Maybe less than 25,000 years old
Jean Combier and Guy Jouve report in L’Anthropologie that the art of Chauvet Cave has been misdated: “New investigations into the cultural and stylistic iden...
Tales of a paleoartist
Discover magazine is running an incredible article by John Gurche about the process of creating his artistic reconstructions of early hominins: “Making Lucy:...
Vermeer obscura
Fascinating article in the New York Times about a new film illustrating the concept of science in art and art in science: “Engineering His Own Vermeer”.
Photo: Roman double helix
From the bathhouse of Caesarea, an interesting double helix motif. Though there are only two strands, every third pass is colored blue.
Gurche profile
The Boston Globe has an interview with the noted artist John Gurche: “John Gurche, hominid sculptor”.
Diversity and science-art
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, has an interesting short description of a science-art project on human variation: “Looking at...
Neandertal painted shell pendant
The final paragraph of this new paper by Marco Peresani and colleagues Peresani:2013 lists all the essential details:
The DNA portrait artist
Twitter gets results! A group of geneticists (honestly, including me) were kvetching on Twitter about this NPR story: “Litterbugs Beware: Turning Found DNA I...
Bead styles in MSA
Michael Balter covers a new paper on MSA shell beads by Marian Vanhaeren and colleagues: “Human ancestors were fashion-conscious”. The study involves beads f...
Ancient art on display
The Observer has a slideshow of some of the “Ice Age Art” pieces being displayed in a temporary exhibition at the British Museum: “Ice Age Art: Arrival of th...
Composite tools
What if you took flaked stone implements, scanned them in three dimensions, designed specially fitted accessories, which you then printed with a 3-d printer ...
Bodies in art, art in bodies
Ewen Callaway compares two exhibits that feature animal anatomy in prominent ways Callaway:flayed:2012. “Animals Inside Out”, at the Natural History Museum,...
Art appreciation
Jonathan Jones muses on two exhibitions of Leonardo’s work, one on paintings and the other on anatomical drawings (“Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a ...
The art of Neandertal teeth
I want to point everybody to this slideshow at Scientific American, which features the “The Science and Art of Neandertal Teeth”. The accompanying article ...
Kennis show
The Daily Mail is running a pictorial showing hominin reconstructions from Kennis and Kennis, who are being featured in a show in Dresden, Germany: “Meet the...
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Lion-Man to be reconstructed from new pieces
Copy of the "Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel", at the American Museum of Natural History
Blombos pigment workshop
I know that some readers are starting to wonder if I’ve forgotten about paleoanthropology lately. Let’s just say that the Neandertal and Denisova genomes hav...
Kids leave their traces in caves with art
Several stories last week related the story (from a conference talk by Jessica Cooney) about evidence that very young children had left finger grooves in the...
Charles Knight Neandertals
A piece of historical reconstruction:
Shoehorning science into art
The Guardian today ran an interesting article giving several examples of artists collaborating with scientists…to make art “When two tribes meet: collaborati...
Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana
Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset and Nick Walker Coulson:2011 (doi isn’t working yet, so here’s a PDF link, 12 MB) have published a long summary of findings ...
Death and the anthropologist
Sunday’s travel theme here in Rome was death.
Science-Art roundup
Glendon Mellow has a Science-Art roundup for this week at Flying Trilobite, including a nice callout for my Bernifal painting.
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Boas goes low
While researching another question, I have been reviewing some Franz Boas. In 1936, American Anthropologist ran a piece by Alfred Kroeber which reviewed some...
Pod pimping
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week author Matt Wedel has two recent posts about the artistic reconstruction of sauropods. The one about head anatomy is es...
Ways of exploring
Glendon Mellow of the Flying Trilobite ruminates on the purposes of scientific art in a guest post at Scientific American: “Scientific accuracy in art”. Out ...
Neandertal stories on parade
Long-time science journalist Robin McKie has a long article in The Observer about the Neandertals this weekend: “Neanderthals: how needles and skins gave us ...
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"Such words as the tide dictates"
The Guardian has a delightful excerpt of a book about typography – Just My Type, by Simon Garfield. I don’t know if it has a U.S. publisher yet, but its aut...
"You could blue screen Ardi"
The Guardian is running an interview with Pauline Fowler, whose company Animated Extras has been involved in many film and television projects where apes and...
LIFE photo-essay at Lascaux, 1947
A LIFE magazine photo-essay brings 15 previously unpublished pictures of Lascaux by Ralph Morse, who was the first professional photographer to enter the sit...
Arthouse cave art
A new film to debut at the Toronto Film Festival is a 90-minute 3-D exploration of Chauvet Cave, directed by Werner Herzog. The LA Times reports on the film:...
Lascaux anniversaire
Bing today has made their image a beautiful photo of Lascaux, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the cave’s discovery.
Lasting supper
This is a great story about “portion sizes” increasing over the centuries in “Last Supper” paintings, but I haven’t been able to get the paper yet.
Walton Ford exhibition
Nature has Martin Kemp review an art exhibition by Walton Ford (“Monkey business”), of interest because of the fine watercolor depictions of animals – remini...
Brain slice art
Artist Noah Scalin gets a play date at the Mutter Museum, and here’s what he does:
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Bones for sale
The Washington Post has a story about resellers of human bone and the people who buy them: “An artistic body of work’s bone of contention.”
New Romanian cave art
Michael Balter describes the discovery of Paleolithic-era art in Coliboaia Cave in Romania:
Quote: Stephen Fry on art
Stephen Fry is a famous British actor, humorist and blogger. He recently gave a speech on the occasion of the private viewing of the Royal Academy Summer Exh...
MSA ochre "factory"
Jennifer Viegas covers the recent discoveries at Sibudu Cave, South Africa: “Stone Age color, glue ‘factory’ found”.
Genyornis in Australian rock art?
Lots of cave paintings in Europe depict animals now extinct. Australian researchers have recently identified a rock painting as a depiction of the extinct th...
The Aurignacian dogs
I didn’t see this article when it came out but I ran across it this week: Pat Shipman writes about possible evidence for early dog domestication (“The Woof a...
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Art and science of fleshed-out fossils
I had the neat experience yesterday of talking to a class about scientific illustration, from my point of view as a scientist who does a lot of illustrating ...
"A sort of bovine contentment"
Smithsonian magazine has a feature highlighting the fleshed-out hominin reconstructions of John Gurche (“A Closer Look at Evolutionary Faces”).
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Tatouage
The Chronicle profiles a few “scholarly” tattoos, and two human evolution students make the list:
Neanderart
Alan Boyle reports on two new papers in PNAS. The first concerns the dental development of the Lagar Velho skeleton. The second verges on Neandertal art:
Book recommendation
I was in a conversation last night about a book I had really enjoyed this year, and I remarked that I had meant to review it on the blog and hadn’t done it y...
Kew art
One of my favorite art bloggers, Katherine Tyrell, has an illustrated review of a Kew Gardens exhibition, titled “The Art of Plant Evolution”.
Freeman Dyson and the new Age of Wonder
Last Tuesday, in my review of Chris Anderson’s Free, I mentioned a beneficial side effect of free exchange of information – the creativity that it enables in...
Paleo-artists in the spotlight
Michael Balter writes in this week’s Science about the artistic reconstruction of ancient fossil hominins. The occasion for the article seems to be John Gurc...
Quote: Goethe on art and nature
"He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret, yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter"
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Aurignacian happy hours
That image conjured by John Noble Wilford just had me tickled:
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Bean, why do you keep painting the earth?
On the intersection of science and art, the NY Times profiles former astronaut Alan Bean, who for nearly thirty years has painted what he experienced in spac...
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Darwin in the arts
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK, is putting on an exhibition titled, “Endless Forms: Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts.”
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Profile: Paleo artist Viktor Deak
On the occasion of the Lucy exhibit going to New York, Donald McNeil, Jr., profiles artist and reconstructor Viktor Deak. Deak’s 78-foot mural of human evolu...
The stuff that dreams are made of
It’s like the final scene in The Maltese Falcon:
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Photoshop web colors
This is off the usual topics, but I mentioned once how poorly colors were coming out when I save sketchbook pieces as JPG. They look great in Photoshop, but ...
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Extinct marsupial lion in Australian rock art
Speaking of super-predators from the past, Natural History Magazine has a short article describing Australian rock art that may depict the extinct marsupial ...
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Today’s sketchbook:
Lascaux update
According to New Scientist, human activity and prior attempts to kill the fungus have made the ecology of Lascaux similar to a hospital cooling tower.
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Archaeology informing the modern
The Economist runs a little article about Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos:
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Goddess on a cave bottom
I don’t have much value to add to the “figurative art” angle to the Hohle Fels Venus figurine. It seems very interesting that there is a concentration of car...
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Today’s sketchbook
Awkward moments when reading
Awkward moments when reading 2: Paul Mellars pulls the old “blame the dirty thoughts on the undergraduates” gambit.
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From scratching to art
Science has a lot of stuff this week about evolution. One of the pieces is a news article by Michael Balter about “the origin of art and symbolism.” The arti...
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Andrew Wyeth on his father's death
I’m very sad about Andrew Wyeth’s death this week. He was one of the first artists I learned about in school, and I have always been inspired by his work.
Sketchbook
Here’s today’s sketchbook page:
Woodcutting today
Doing woodcuts today…
Burrup rock art to be relocated
Paul Ham reports on developments which may force the relocation of rock art in northwestern Australia:
Christopher Wren, architect, scientific illustrator
Oxford scholars Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis have a short essay about the anatomical drawing of Christopher Wren in Nature this week.
Cave paintings a 20,000-year-long palimpsest?
Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council is promoting some new work on U-series dating of cave art, led by Alistair Pike of Bristol University. The mos...
Paleolithic multimedia
Paleolithic multimedia?
New French Paleolithic cave art
The AP is reporting on a new cave art find in France.
Darwinian literary criticism
Nature has a short feature by John Whitfield about the new wave of Darwinism in literary criticism.
Carl Buell interview
DarkSyde at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has done an interview with paleo-artist Carl Buell, which has some of Buell's great illustrations, along with his exp...