Nathaniel's Scriptorium Ambo
Shown here are all the cavalry and infantry troop figures for one side of a two player game. Not pictured are the artillery and other equipment pieces each player also needs. Eventually, all of one side's pieces will be red and the other player's pieces will be ivory or whitish.
My paintings will hang at North Water Street Gallery a little longer now. Cool.
Knights! There are about 70 here but I only need 60. This probably looks like some strange fetish collection or OCD dark hoarding, but I don't think it is. I hope not. In truth, I need these for my current WIP and I acquired most of them in one haul. More on this to come as it develops and it is shaping up pretty well so far.
So here's a thing. Grateful to Jeff Ingram of the North Water Street Gallery in Kent, Oh. for setting this up. Jeff was actually the first person to show one of my pictures in a gallery outside of a school event way back in 1999...or was it 1997? Either way, great guy who runs an excellent community arts organization called Standing Rock Cultural Arts.
Check them out online at: https://www.standingrock.net/
mixed media on newspaper on cardboard, 31 x 40 inches.
I love Paul Klee. Brilliant designer. Unsurpassed stylist. A very special human being. I worked through the better part of his notebooks and Bauhaus lessons and while I'm not saying it was a complete waste of time, it was almost a complete waste of time. Not sure if he was a hustler or was sincerely attempting to document and explain his process in earnest technically, but the teachings amount to a whole lot of psuedo-intellectual hot air. Couched in exclusivity jargon and fancy terms for brick-simple concepts, the bulk of the materials aren't worth the time for a person trying to improve his or her craft. People claiming his writings on Art are on par with da Vinci are lying or confused. Whereas da Vinci informed generations of not just artists and craftspeople but also engineers and technicians, Klee's writings are thousands of pages the end result of which can be better internalized by understanding the golden mean and a brief survey of his artist's statement/manifesto. Or better yet, study his pictures. I imagine it was a combination of needing to justify his approach and teaching position, keep pace with the intelligentsia fashions of pre-Great War Germany and fill time when asked to speak publicly on his work that led to his prodigious overly complex prose. That or he was sincere and extremely neurotic. His math exercises take the student on long tedious journeys of arithmetic that end up illustrating principles that if not patently obvious or intuitively graspable are demonstrable by considerably more direct and simple means. That and they aren't particularly helpful to a person trying to improve his or her design powers.
Regardless, he's great. My favorite of the...whaddya call it? Was he Cubist or Expressionist? Whatever. I'm glad he defies classification. That's a hallmark of Quality, in my humble opinion.
Oh, also, like Klee, I made this frame by hand for the painting and the mat area is part of the painting itself. Note that the original is around 10.5" x 15.5" whereas my loose interpretive copy is a bit bigger at 31 x 40 inches. It hangs in my home above the landing on the stairs.
A list of blog topics I was going to write up, but I'm NOT going to write now because I don't have time.
1.) Agnes Sorel and What We Can Learn about 15th Century Competition. ~ Proto-feminism or simply boobs FTW?
2.) Red Madder Dyes and Why the Roman Legions Were Actually Pink (plus West's "Death of General Wolfe.") ~ Rethink what you think things looked like.
3.) Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher's Sino-American Wargame He Keeps Making People Play. ~ "Taiwan Tabletop Exercise (TTX)." Wargames are important practical tools. China war bad and scary.
4.) How GMT's "This Accursed Civil War" Map of Naseby is Very Wrong. ~ It's wrong. Sulby Hedges shaped wrong and field 200-300 yards too wide East to West.
5.) How Chris Peers's "Death in the Dark Continent" Got it Right. ~ Solid game. Even solider reference. On the shelf alongside Pakenham.
6.) Why You Can't Do Much Better than "De Bellis Antiquitatis." ~ Really and truly, you probably just can't.
7.) Why Spike Jones is an Underappreciated Genius and You Should Love Him. ~ Hilarious, ubiquitous and of high quality.
8.) My Favorite Depictions of George IV in Film & Television. ~ Jim Howick's my current favorite.
9.) Albrecht Altdorfer & Early Modern Design. ~ He did it first and better. Except maybe see C. Corot.
10.) A Review of "The Faithful Executioner." ~ A fantastic book.
11.) Depictions of Speed of Foot in Gaming Compared to Real Life: An Informal Survey of Several Popular Systems. ~ Basically 1mph for masses of troops in battle array, moving and maintaining formations. Frequent stops by section to dress lines. Slow.
12.) The Real Reason Shakespeare is Stylistically Inconsistent. ~ No scoring or special effects. Or even sets really. Language alone cues audience on pace, tone and intensity of a given scene.
13.) In Praise of Ronald Lacey. ~ Best bad guys.
14.) Words and Ideas that Don't Exist in English: l'histoire des mentalités & Tagesmarsch ~ As utilitarian as it is, English is at times deficient in its Artfulness.
No, not (just) the ancient aliens guy with the hair from History Channel...
While reading the rules to the old SPI game 'Conquistador,' from S&T magazine no.58 Sept/Oct 1976, and looking at the credits, was surprised to see Whitley Strieber's name under acknowledgements.
What? How? Why?
All I can gather from google is that Strieber was working in advertising in NYC during SPI days. Must be a study in nerdiness here we're missing out on. Who knew whom, I wonder.
* - In case the name doesn't immediately ring a bell, Strieber wrote, among others, the book "Communion" about his experiences with alien abduction at the hands of the now-famous big-eyed gray aliens. This book along with X-files, media coverage of the Roswell incident and JFK conspiracy theories all made for an exciting period for nerdery in the 1990s.
