“Miniature topographies inside 200-gallon fish tanks, based on traditional landscape paintings. Keever fills the tanks with water once he’s sculpted and placed the miniatures, and colored lights and pigments create dense, atmospheric environments. He views his works as an evolution of the landscape tradition and deliberately acknowledges the conceptual artifice.”
Dinotopia is a fictional utopia created by author and illustrator James Gurney. It is the setting for the book series with which it shares its name. Dinotopia is an isolated island inhabited by shipwrecked humans and sentient dinosaurus who have learned to coexist peacefully as a single symbiotic society. The first book has “appeared in 18 languages in more than 30 countries and sold two million copies.”Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time and Dinotopia: The World Beneath both won Hugo awards for best original artwork.
God these images still send this ENTIRE thrill through me. They just evoke that feeling of being a child with a book too large for you, staying for so long on a single picture that you feel like you could turn around in it.
Gurney consistently produces a world that feels completely reasonable and real. The color, the light, the relationships between fore- and background,
the fact that it seems like a real world, where people are engaging in perfectly reasonable cultural activities…
The natural gestures, implying the personalities and relationships of characters in a single image…
And it’s quite creative. I mean, look at this pair of bagel sellers. WHAT A GREAT WAY TO SELL BAGELS?
Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.
Sophie, the girl, is given a spell and transformed into an old woman. It would be a lie to say that turning young again would mean living happily ever after. I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to make it seem like turning old was such a bad thing — the idea was that maybe she’ll have learned something by being old for a while, and, when she is actually old, make a better grandma. Anyway, as Sophie gets older, she gets more pep. And she says what’s on her mind. She is transformed from a shy, mousy little girl to a blunt, honest woman. It’s not a motif you see often, and, especially with an old woman taking up the whole screen, it’s a big theatrical risk. But it’s a delusion that being young means you’re happy.
Hayao Miyazaki, on what attracted him to Howl’s Moving Castle
The Auteur of Anime by Margaret Talbot: “The New Yorker” (January 17th, 2005)
Honestly I think this is awesome, symbols should be as dynamic as the needs of our communities, we should not be afraid to change them whenever we feel it is needed.
And while this is symbolic and doesn’t immediately translate to real change, the messages it sends, both “POC are Here” and “Racists not welcome” are important.
All the white people flipping out about this because they think it’s not beautiful or not traditional or not a rainbow as it appears in nature are showing how used they are to a sheltered condition of not having to seriously consider the needs of people of color, because they think an esthetic matters more than the question of whether this is an effective way to adress a real issue. How did we get to a point where that level of apathy is normal?
So I support this. Heck, I’d support it if we wrote ‘RACISTS FUCK OFF’ on every single pride flag until the day when we didn’t have a single racist left in our communities. That would be worth changing all our symbols for.
