Tetherd Cow Ahead

Today,while looking for something else entirely* I came across an image of a curiously titled painting, ‘In Praise of the Pickled Herring’, by the 17th century Dutch painter Joseph de Bray (someone of whom, until today, I was entirely unaware).

The website where I learned of Joseph, which is dedicated to ‘Food in the Arts’, leads me to believe that this painting is a fine example of ‘Fish Still-Lifes’, an artistic niche that had also previously (and regrettably, I must add) passed me by.

This is the full version of the painting (click to get a closer look), which features, as a centrepiece, a stone table drapped with herrings and onions, and inscribed with the poem that gives the painting its name. It was penned by preacher and poet Jacob Westerbaen, and contains the picturesque declaration that the consumption of pickled herring:

Will make you apt to piss
And you will not fail (with pardon) to shit
And ceaselessly fart…

I immediately set about attempting to track down a complete rendering of Westerbaen’s poem, because if anything at all in this world is certain, it is that Cow readers will be clamouring to learn all that is to be known about literature that involves soused fish, poetry and bodily functions. It appears, alas, that no-one has seen fit to bring the genius of Westerbaen’s herring musings to the digital world, which is a shame because I feel it is more than obvious that there is a monumental dearth of pickled fish verse in our lives today. To that end, faithful Acowlytes I know you will more than rise to the occasion, so I’m declaring a TCA competition:

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to write a paean to preserved fish. You may include references to the digestive process if you wish. Most importantly you should understand that you toil in the shadow of greatness – make Jacob Westerbaen proud!

There will be a real prize this time.

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*Another reason I love teh internets.

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For your diversion, some eye candy: here are a few of the math structures I’m working with in my artwork at the moment. In these, the images incorporate, as text, parts of the equations that I’ve used to construct the images themselves (you can’t get a lot more recursive than that):

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*These particular images don’t have anything at all to do with the Fibonacci Series. I was just trying to come up with a cool headline…

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A Supreme Being from Srinivas Krishna’s video artwork When The Gods Came Down To Earth casts a sardonic eye over Polish Neocatechumenal Pilgrims in Melbourne’s Federation Square.

There’s a certain level of high class irony in operation here.

Longtime readers will remember the story of The Prowler and how illustrator Kevin Cornell realised him in frightening watercolour on his great site over at Bearskin Rug (go there now and be amused).

Kevin was kind enough to send me an artist’s proof of his Prowler watercolour which I recently had framed in an appropriate manner. I am now awaiting the refurbishment of the crypt so that I may hang this wonderful rendering on the wall, flanked, of course, by two sputtering candles.

This is how the finished piece came out!

I have been working with some really interesting generative functions in my artwork and I thought you might like to see some of the results.

(Click on the image and type ‘N’ for Next or ‘P’ for Previous)

The kinds of mathematical systems I’m using for these systems are deeply fascinating. All the images you can see in the above slideshow are closely related, even though they might look substantially different. They seem to resemble complicated organic lifeforms and yet the maths that describes them is remarkably simple.

It works something like this: I outline a basic element, let’s say a small lozenge shape and a circle. Then I tell the maths to do a very simple thing – make a two copies of those shapes in the next generation, displace them in space and rotate them a little. Each subsequent generation executes the same instructions.

This simple set of rules gives rise to a branching structure like you might see in a tree. If I add a few more basic commands (a little random variation in the shapes, some colour change over generations) an astonishing piece of magic happens – the resulting images look organic – even like creatures you might find in the real world. All kinds of phenomena that I don’t specifically code (such as asymmetry and textural effects) appear spontaneously.

I’ve only begun to experiment with these concepts and I fully expect to see some truly wonderful results from this work.