Meyerheim's 'Remains of the Meal'

Paul Meyerheim chose an unusual subject for this painting: 

Paul Friedrich Meyerheim (1842-1915) The Remains of the Meal

oil on canvas 138.7 x 176.3 cm, 1879

An outdoor meal that was abandoned by humans has become a feast for a flock of chickens and a couple of sparrows. The big rooster is the featured star of the action, strutting across the tablecloth.

It's an interesting twist on the classic Dutch still life painting of a table after a meal, and a scenario that would have taken some imagination to assemble.

Turkey Consciousness

Naturalist Joe Hutto, who raised a flock of imprinted turkeys, says that they are extremely smart and aware communicators.

“But their ability to understand the world goes much further than just communication. I came to realize that these young turkeys in many ways were more conscious than I was”

In this nature video, he replays the experiment from his book Illumination in the Flatwoods. He raises a bunch of wild turkeys, allowing them to imprint on him so that he's their parent. The exercise—which must have taken total commitment for the better part of a year—gives us a rare insight into the umwelt of some very impressive wild animals.
 

How I Paint a Dahlia in Casein

Painting is about continuously controlling your visual attention so that you see only what you need to see at each stage, and tune out the rest.

I also think about (Link to YouTube) about the remarkable visual perception abilities of bees. 

Did you know honey bees have five eyes? In addition to the two large compound eyes located on the sides of the head they've got three small eyes called “ocelli” on top of their head. Ocelli are not used to gather images; instead they are light receptors.

And when honey bees are in flight, their color vision is turned off. The world appears in black and white. But when they approach their target flower, the colors come into focus.

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Read more in the online article How Bees See Flowers

Spinosaurus Restorations, Step by Step

In this YouTube video, I demonstrate step-by-step process of painting two restorations of the dinosaur Spinosaurus under the direction of Dr. Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago.

Dr. Sereno's scientific paper, called "Spinosaurus is Not an Aquatic Dinosaur," set out to refute claims by other researchers that Spinosaurus was a fast attack hunter underwater. Sereno's team developed a CT-based skeletal restoration of Spinosaurus and examined its hydrodynamic properties. They found that the digital model of Spinosaurus performed very poorly in water, supporting the alternative "semi-aquatic hypothesis." In an interview, Sereno said, "I don't think it was a good swimmer nor capable of full submergence behavior."

Coauthors include Donald M. Henderson, Daniel Vidal, Frank E. Fish, Stephanie L. Baumgart, Tyler M. Keillor, Kiersten K. Formoso, Nathan Myrhvold, and Lauren L. Conroy. 

READ MORE: 

'Spinosaurus Not Aquatic'

'Spinosaurus Is Not an Aquatic Dinosaur'

Honeybees Can Distinguish a Monet from a Picasso

Honeybees are good visual learners, and for some time it's been known that they can distinguish colors, shapes, and patterns. They can also recognize landscape scenes, flowers, and even human faces.

What are the limits of these abilities? Scientists constructed an experiment to test whether honeybees could recognize individual human artistic styles, such as the Impressionist paintings by Monet vs. Cubist or semi-abstract paintings by Picasso.

 

The findings show that they can learn to recognize and distinguish one style from another. They can generalize complex visual features even in images they've never seen before.

Given the relatively small size of the bees' brains, which weigh less than a milligram and contain just 960,000 neurons, the scientists argue that this appears to arise from a basic ability to "extract and categorize the visual characteristics of complex images" and is not a "higher cognitive function that is unique to humans."
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Scientific paper: Honeybees can discriminate between Monet and Picasso paintings

Related: Preference for and discrimination of paintings by mice

Octopolis

In Australia an unusual society of octopuses has congregated in Jervis Bay, which observers have dubbed "Octopolis." 

Octopuses are normally relatively solitary, so this tendency to group together is not fully understood. 

Marine biologist Peter Godfrey-Smith reports that he's noticed a lot of "ornery" behavior that resembles fighting, boxing, bullying, and even shooting shell projectiles underwater. He's not completely sure if this is just territorial squabbling or something else. 

More at Earth Touch Network.

Dog Art Exhibition in London

There's an exhibition of dog art this summer in London all summer which includes  The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner by Edwin Landseer and Brizo by Rosa Bonheur.

Brizo by Rosa Bonheur

‘Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney’ will be on display at The Wallace Collection from 29 March to 15 October 2023

Edward Troye's Horse Paintings

Edward Troye (1808-1874) was a Swiss-American painter who specialized in animal subjects, particularly horses. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland and studied art in Munich, Germany, before immigrating to the United States in 1831. 

Settling on ranches, first in Kentucky and later in Alabama, Troye focused primarily on commissioned portraits of racehorses and their owners. His portraits were often noted for their accuracy, grace, and attention to detail.

Troye's most well-known works include depictions of famous American thoroughbreds, their owners, and their Jockeys. 

 

Throughout his career, Troye worked closely with many of the leading figures in American racing, and his paintings helped to establish a visual record of the early history of American horse racing. 

Troye died in 1874, and his paintings were mostly forgotten until 1912, when people started connecting one painting with another until over 300 were found.

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Edward Troye on Wikipedia

How Birds See Each Other

Many birds and insects have receptors for colors that we humans can't see. 

Starlings, for example, can see colors in reflected ultraviolet light that are beyond our human capacity. On the left is how starlings look to humans. On the right is how starlings may look to each other. 

Image credit: Klaus Schmitt 

According to Neringa Utaraitė: "Birds are tetrachromats, [so] they see four colors: UV, blue, green, and red, whereas we are trichromats and can only see three colors: blue, green, red. Bear in mind, that the magenta UV “color” shown here has been chosen to make it visible for us humans, it is a “false color”, as per definition UV light has no color."

Thanks, Massimo via Bored Panda

Rilke's Panther Poem

Animal artists at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. From the magazine "L'Illustration", 7 August 1902.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "The Panther" describes the plight of a big cat living in the cage of a zoo:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

- English translation by Stephen Mitchell

The Animal Art of Caroline Clowes

A group of cattle in a pastoral setting looks up, as if alarmed. What is bothering them?

The answer is visible at the far right of the composition, where a train fills the quiet landscape with noise and smoke. 

The painting was a response to the addition of an east-west train line through Dutchess County, New York. 

Caroline Clowes lived from 1838-1904, a life nearly coinciding with another animal painter, Rosa Bonheur. 

This exhibitor pass was what you needed to get into one of her exhibitions.

Now there's a free exhibition of original art by Caroline Clowes on view at the Samuel Morse estate in Poughkeepsie, New York through December 30, 2022.

Here's a video with more information.

More on Wikipedia.

Info about the exhibition of works by Caroline Clowes

Bulldog

My parents had a white bulldog named 'Winnie' named after Winston Churchill. 

Bulldogs are so lovable and funny looking, and they're a blast to paint.

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Here's the acrylic-on-colored-craft-foam time lapse process of painting this of dog.

A Dinosaur-Eating Mammal

Here are two concept sketches of the Cretaceous mammal Repenomamus.

It's an extinct badger sized animal who raided dinosaur nests.

I also made a maquette out of an air-dry craft foam.

The finished painting of is fully documented in a Gumroad tutorial called "The Mammal That Ate Dinosaurs."

The illustration appeared in an article on paleo mammals in Scientific American.

Raymond de la Nézière, Animal Artist

Raymond de la Nézière (1865-1953) was a French illustrator and comic artist with a gift for capturing expressive poses in animal caricature.

He began drawing and painting from a young age, encouraged by his mother, who was a painter and potter. 

In his early years he painted in oil and then began using more gouache and watercolor.

 

He illustrated many books and sketched all sorts of animals, sometimes in naturalistic poses, and sometimes anthroporphized as human types.

He also participated as a hunter and a horseback rider.

The Horse Pictures of Eduard Thöny

Eduard Thöny (1866-1950) was known for his excellent draftsmanship. 

He loved to include equestrian subjects and often put his horses in dramatic action poses. 

In 1890 he visited Paris to study the historical paintings of equestrian specialist Edouard Detaille.

Die allerhöchste Auszeichnung für Künstler (The Highest Award for Artists) 

In 1899 he made an incisive caricature of the famous artists Anton von Werner and Adolph von Menzel).

See more examples of Eduard Thöny on Wikimedia Commons. (1866-1950)

Previous post on Eduard Thony's Caricatures

Detailed German Wikipedia entry about Eduard Thöny.

Feather Identification Websites

Find a feather? What bird is it from? 

By law you're not supposed to possess feathers from wild birds (in order to protect birds from being hunted for their feathers), but there are a couple of good websites to help with feather identification anyway.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has a website called Feather Atlas that helps you identify feathers based on  color, position, pattern, size, and kind of bird.

Featherbase is another website focusing on bird feathers. The site lays out the feathers of a given bird, and arranging them in groups so you can see the variety of feather types that cover a bird's body. 

Animal Fable Illustrations by E.M. Rachev

Evgenii (or Yevgeny) Rachev (1906-1997) was an illustrator best known for his images of animal fables from Russian folk tales.

Postcards based on Russian folk tales, 1960, E.M. Rachev.

He used animal characters to tell his stories, but of course the allegories were really about human foibles.

He said: "If my birds and animals help you to fathom that the story is actually about people it means that I reached the same effect as the folk tales did."

He grew up with his grandparents in Siberia. According to an online bio:

"He remembered Siberia as a fantastic land. Black grouses sitting pompously on fir branches in the evenings... Fish and wild ducks swarming the lakes... No end to mushrooms and berries in summer... But when the boy was 14 years old his grandmother died. He decided to go to his mother who at that time lived in Novorosiisk. It took him three months to get there through Russia ravaged by the revolution."

As a side hobby he collected interesting shapes of tree roots, which he sculpted into animal shapes.

His wife Lidya Ivanovna Racheva collaborated with him by compiling stories, researching costumes, and writing texts.

His books are beloved in Russian and French editions, and there is at least one book of his folk tales available in English.

Website with bio in English

Wikipedia page 

Joy the Christmas Donkey

 

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The baby donkey "Peanut's Christmas Joy," or just "Joy" for short, was born 12 years ago.

She arrived in the barn stall early Christmas morning, a complete surprise to the farmer Lenny, who said he didn't even know Peanut was pregnant.

He went in to do the morning chores and noticed Peanut was acting funny. There was a dark shape in the corner. At first he thought a dog had gotten in there. He put Joy in a blanket and let her out into the snow and she met all the other donkeys.

Therianthropy

Therianthropy is the ability to shape-shift between human and animal.

The Kelpie by Herbert Draper

Kelpies are one example. They frequent occur in Celtic folklore, appearing as black horses in the water, but with the ability to change into human form.

Some cave art has also included strange figures that scholars have interpreted as therianthropes. For example, this drawing of a cave painting by Henri Breuil shows what appears to be a human with an antlered head. He suggests it represents a shaman, sorcerer, or magician.

Other famous therianthropes include the selkie, which alternate between seal and human. The movie "The Secret of Roan Inish" is one of many interpretations.

Wikipedia summarizes the standard plotline: "A typical folk-tale is that of a man who steals a female selkie's skin, finds her naked on the sea shore, and compels her to become his wife. But the wife will spend her time in captivity longing for the sea, her true home, and will often be seen gazing longingly at the ocean. She may bear several children by her human husband, but once she discovers her skin, she will immediately return to the sea and abandon the children she loved."

Another famous example is the werewolf (therianthropy), as well as dog-human shapeshifters (cynanthropy).

Book Review: 100 Flying Birds

Artists who paint birds need clear reference photos of various flight positions. 

A new book called 100 Flying Birds: Photographing the Mechanics of Flight delivers a helpful collection of images in a beautiful and useful form.

Author and photographer Peter Cavanagh has documented the flight poses of a variety of species, from swans and geese to hummingbirds to eagles and owls. 

The photos are sharp and clear, reproduced full-page along with the author's commentary on the facing page. The text presents the context of the shot, the mechanics of the flight pose, or insights about behavior or the environment.

That text combined with the photos makes this an unusually welcome resource for birdwatchers or ornithological artists who want a better understanding of their subject.

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100 Flying Birds: Photographing the Mechanics of Flight, by Peter Cavanagh, Firefly Books, 320 pages, all color, 11 x 11 inches. 

Mr. Cavanagh curated the exhibition "How Birds Fly" exhibit at Seattle's Museum of Flight in 2015.

Photos by Peter Cavanagh (@howbirdsfly on Twitter).