Cameron Ellis

Oc-tych

jamescameronellis — Mon, 30 May 2011 03:17:05 +0000

On their way to the pocked concrete of Oakland, California. About as far away from the Challis National Forest as it gets:

Shrub-Steppe

jamescameronellis — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 03:48:15 +0000

I’m sweating out this post about biodiversity gradients, but can’t seem to get beyond big ungulates of the shrub-steppe tonight:

Migration

jamescameronellis — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:33:17 +0000

The great migrations. They are so absorbing – almost like a car wreck on the side of the highway. Why?

The Mountain Institute

jamescameronellis — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:12:07 +0000

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

jamescameronellis — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:43:01 +0000

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

jamescameronellis — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:00:34 +0000

Sparsely narrated graphic vignettes – kind of inspired by Nikki McClure’s paper cuts…

…ink nebulae x accidental forms = religion.

Crown of the Continent

jamescameronellis — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:47:20 +0000

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

jamescameronellis — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:18:12 +0000

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

jamescameronellis — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:58:14 +0000

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

jamescameronellis — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:34:49 +0000

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!