On their way to the pocked concrete of Oakland, California. About as far away from the Challis National Forest as it gets:
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- Anthropology x Ecology (1)
- Art (7)
- Maps (5)
Shrub-Steppe
I’m sweating out this post about biodiversity gradients, but can’t seem to get beyond big ungulates of the shrub-steppe tonight:
Migration
The great migrations. They are so absorbing – almost like a car wreck on the side of the highway. Why?
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The Mountain Institute
The Mountain Institute – West Virginia. We spent three weeks there, in the fall, staying in a little wooden yurt, migrating to a huge wooden yurt for meals and to hang with TMI staff. One of the best working-vacations (those are really the best) I’ve ever known.
I came from our massive western landscapes, with alluvial fans that would swallow small countries, to the intimate gullies and runs of Appalachia. I felt like I’d come from the uncurated surface of mars straight into a japanese garden. In the forest, each rounded stone, perfectly nested – all the scraps and rough edges carried away millennia ago. It was hard not to look for the architect.
…and full of limestone caverns and sink-holes, which adds some *ominous* to any landscape.
2′ Lidar
Here’s what a cherry picked candy-apple archaeological landscape map looks like. The notes are fluff, and a hard-nosed archaeologist would probably beat me up and stab me with a trowel over them. But I couldn’t resist posting this, because 2-foot lidar contours are about the most intimate way to caress the ancient creases of this globe — we’ve called it home for so long:
Megafauna
Sparsely narrated graphic vignettes – kind of inspired by Nikki McClure’s paper cuts…
…ink nebulae x accidental forms = religion.
Crown of the Continent
Did you know our continent has a crown? Yup. It’s right here in Montana. I made these for a publication over the summer – with our berries, clear water, alluvial greenery. Rocky canyons choking on fleshy plumes of vegetation.
I wonder how they would be different if I made them now, in the last throes of winter?
The Elephants
There is something so carnal and satisfying about the shape of Pleistocene animals. I could draw these elephant-types all day and never get tired of them. Elephants, bison, moose, condor – they are living ghosts. Do they wander the lonely plains – searching for lost comrades from the Pleistocene? I think we humans do.
None of us have ever seen a mammoth, but that lump on their forehead is as familiar as a skyline:
Is this what the last one looked like when you found him?:
Poor Folk
Gut wrenching pains of poverty aside, I would’ve kicked ass at the great depression.
Scrawled somewhere in my DNA is code for the scalding shade of empty oil drums and dirt caked on my skin like a melon rind:
Of course I would’ve stood in the poor-folk lines too. Lines so long, they stretched around the block:
Machines don’t have guts.
Northern Rockies
The Sonoran Institute is my employer! Here’s geographic look at what we do out of our Northern Rockies office:
Come visit us in Bozeman!
Upper Sea of Cortez – Geotourism
I made this map for the Mexican government as a part of their plans to increase touristic viability of the Upper Sea of Cortez and the Colorado River Delta.
The map above is mostly cartography, but it serves as a communication plate for a larger spatial analysis – trying to identify the best possible location for siting a Colorado River Delta / Upper Sea of Cortez interpretive center. A number of variables, as well as expert opinion, went into the siting process. Here are samples of a few:
Motion
Most interesting things are in motion (or conspicuously ‘not in motion,’ I guess) – but capturing motion with a pencil is really hard. That’s why you see so many cartoons falling back on curved lines and banal symbols.
For about a year I’ve been obsessed with stencils and spray-paints, and the motion they capture. They’re like rudimentary photography. A simple positive and negative. The length of spray is a proxy for exposure. Then lift and lower the stencil a little bit to tweak the focus.
Here are two sheep. Same stencil = same sheep personality, just different motion …and different sheep clothes.
The problem with working in a digital universe, is that messy media like a can of spraypaint and a plastic stencil aren’t really allowed in – except in low-bandwidth formats, like a Wacom tablet. Fortunately, Adobe makes a good gateway, even if it looses a little grit in the process:
