I have a pair of cardinals in my front yard who like to raid the chicken coop yard, where I leave lots of goodies for my chickens and ducks.
Not too long ago, the female went into the yard under the coop and could not find her way out. I was concerned that the chickens would hurt her, so I went and got a towel and escorted her out.
When I let go of the female cardinal, she immediately flew away. But when a similar thing happened with her male counterpart, he was so stubbornly biting the towel I had tried to wrap him in that he almost did not realize he was free.
This is a very small sampling of cardinals, of course, so it may be the behavioral difference is due to individual characteristics of these two birds rather than their sex. But as anecdotal evidence goes, I tend to think that their sex may have had something to do with it.
Because I inherited the correspondence that belonged to my grandmother Klara Goldstoff Katz at the time of her death, the five generations will be counting from her mother, Mirla Goldstoff all the way to my daughter Sword Katz. I also … Continue reading →
I have tried to draw or paint T’Pring on several occasions during my life. Below is a comparison of the very earliest painting and the latest.
Many people when they look at my paintings of T’Pring ask whether she was Chinese, because her eyes appear to be slanted or the crease above the eye seems missing. Is this an idiosyncrasy of my painting style, or is the Vulcan’s ethnicity mostly in the eyes of the beholder?
In the old Star Trek episode “Amok Time”, T’Pring was introduced as Spock’s betrothed, a full blooded Vulcan who despised Spock for being a half-breed.
What do Vulcans look like? Well, they look like humans, only they have pointed ears, slanted eyebrows, and they never smile.
However, in the clothing of T’Pring and in the palanquin in which T’Pau was carried, we see East Asian influences. The makeup artist who helped Arlene Martel dress for the part must also have thought that Vulcans should look a little bit East Asian. Arlene Martel was the American born daughter of two Austrians of Jewish ancestry. She was definitely not Chinese or any other kind of East Asian. However, Martel was noted for being able to alter her appearance to almost any ethnicity when she was playing a part. I talk about this in the video embedded below.
Recently someone told me that T’Pring could not have had the eyes I gave her in my painting, because she was Jewish. Well, I’m pretty sure T’Pring was not Jewish. She was a pure blooded Vulcan who looked down on human culture. As for Arlene Martel, I have no idea about her religion. Nor does it particularly matter what the actress was. She disappeared entirely when playing a part, as any good actor would do. My painting is of T’Pring, not Arlene.
Also, just so you know, there are East Asian Jews who do in fact have Chinese ancestry. I wrote about some of them in Our Lady of Kaifeng. So being Jewish would not preclude T’Pring from looking Chinese had the Vulcan decided that she wanted to convert to Judaism. But that is an alternate universe I do not care to explore.
We held an election. Who won? No results have been certified yet. Will the Electoral College be allowed to meet? Will they decide it? Will the Supreme Court have something to say about voter fraud? Everything is still up in the air, but the mainstream media act as if it is all decided. Julia and I discussed this last night.
Many people who feel they are censored by social media sites are moving to alternative sites. Here is a list.
However, it is not clear that censorship is limited to the mainstream sites. Surely the Russian site will have a Russian bias, the George Soros site will have a globalist bias, and each site will censor information in its own way. The best way to make sure that you are never censored is to own your site. Julia and I do own our sites. Check them out.
Is this a realistic painting or a caricature? I discuss in the video below.
Character is the most important element that I try to represent in paintings. But unlike the connotation of caricature, my paintings do not mock the subject. They celebrate the individuality of the people portrayed. Maybe if people were less prone to the anti-etymological fallacy then I could safely call my portraits caricatures.
For now I will just say the painting is a character-based representation.
The original constitution of the United States provided many checks and balances, all to make sure that it would not be possible for any part of the Federal government to tyrannize and overpower the people or the States. The three branches of government are all meant to make it difficult to pass laws, to impose taxes, to create regulations and to declare war. Not the least of the checks and balances in the constitution as originally enacted was the fact that the President of the United States and the Vice President were to be selected from the same pool of would-be presidents. When someone declared that he was running for president, he might just as easily end up as vice president in the government of a rival who got more votes than he did. The second runner up in the popularity contest would be granted the title of Vice President.
Wouldn’t having a President and a Vice President who have widely differing beliefs, plans and constituencies cause too much gridlock in the Senate? The Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom realized that when it comes to government, there is no such thing as too much gridlock!
Julia Hanna and I recently discussed this topic on our show.
In order that fewer voters become entirely disenfranchised every time a new president is elected, it is important that the person chosen by the losing constituency still get a public office and plenty of power to stop the winner in the presidential election from having unbridled power.
After all, the purpose of our revolution was to take power away from the government and to hand it back to the states and the people. Why not go back to what the founders intended?
Yes, there was a minor glitch during the election of 1800. But this could easily be solved by giving each elector in the Electoral College only one vote for president. Then after that one vote is cast, the person with the second largest number of votes for President should be made Vice President with no further ado.
Don’t like the gentleman who got the most electoral votes? No problem, the person who got the second largest number of votes will make life very difficult for him for the next four years. Don’t like either of them? No problem. They will be so gridlocked they will not cause any trouble for any of us.
For Halloween I painted a spooky portrait based on an old, faded and overexposed photo. Part of what made it creepy was that it was in fact a caricature of the original image. What would it take to make the painting less of a caricature and more like a realistic portrait?
Surprisingly, it is not adding details, but rather substracting and muting the idiosyncratic traits of the subject that creates a more pleasing portrait. Caricatures of us seem to resemble our own faces more than photos do. But a more flattering painting mutes the things that make us look like ourselves in favor of what we have in common with the rest of humanity.
There is a popular misconception that the more detailed a painting is, the more realistic it must be. But today’s animations can be extremely detailed, while remaining cartoonish, while some very realistic paintings do not share many details.
Yesterday, while painting “Under the Umbrella”, I had some thoughts about the topic of detail and realism, which I share in the narration of the video embedded below.
As I become more proficient in painting, I am learning to create more realistic images without adding more detail to my paintings. The improvement in realism stems from more accurate part to whole relations in the painting, without adding more details. It is not a matter of size or even exactly of shape, but of how the parts go smoothly together to make the whole.
When we learn to draw as children, our representations are mostly symbolic. Each part that is represented is loosely tied to the whole, but as we begin to have more realistic representations, the parts and the whole are more smoothly related one to the other. Some of this has to do with correct angles and spatial alignment, but other effects are related to how we slice the continuum. Continuity or the illusion of same can be created without adding detail, by allowing different objects to gradually ease into one another, rather than showing boundaries in the form of lines.
In this painting, Yoon Seri is especially realistic, while Captain Ri is a tad less so. Notice there are fewer details given in the case of the woman, but those details are well coordinated to create a whole. The progression from symbolism to realism is not in the details, but in the smooth relationships of part to whole.
In 1963, my family went on a trip to Scotland and England. We rented a car and saw the sights. But the biggest impression that stayed with me over the years was of seeing the swans.
Yesterday, I decided to try to paint the swans, based on an old photo.
The result was a bit abstract.
How do you remember things that happened when you were three? Do you have faded pictures in an old photo album. Or do you paint your memories to keep them fresh?
When things get very polarized, the two sides of the coin — the two polarities — seem to need each other so much. Where would Republicans be without Democrats? Where would Antifa be without the KKK? Where would anybody be whose very existence is based on the intolerance of the other side?
Recently I ran across this essay by my father, Amnon Katz, from 1992. Julia and I discussed it on our show.
