 Wendy's
Artwork
(Click on any bordered image for a larger
view)
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Drawings
 Although
I'm only an amateur artist, I've enjoyed making pencil
sketches all my life. I've dabbled in most of the media
available before computers, and now with that, too. A few
years ago I made these renderings of two of the fuzzy
critters here, Pica, a chocolate-point Siamese, and Nago
(her son), a seal-point. They were done with a medium lead
pencil on bristol board.
I've finally found some
of my other drawings of the cats (hooray!), these drawn on
high quality vellum, which I was trying out at the time.
Below are two of them, pencil sketches of Pica ("Peek")
curled against Subi, and one of Subi asleep alone. When I
was recovering from the broken hip I got in our freak auto
accident in 1982, our friend Carol Donner suggested I try
drawing to occupy me when I could only sit or recline. Good
ways to get the brain going again, too, and I thank her for
her empathetic "therapy" (Carol is also an excellent artist,
who works in many difficult media, unlike my self-taught
scratchings.)
Subi
slips away
The
time I've been dreading finally arrived. Subi, the eldest of
the original four critters, the tough little cat who
outlived all his friends, is no more. He nearly reached 20
years old (6 1/2 weeks short), which is pretty amazing by
itself (I've been told not much more than one out of 100
cats attain that age). You can also see how thin he'd become
in the last two years. For more on saying good-bye to a dear
feline friend, look at the photos and text on
the Photos 2 Page.
To see a larger view of this pencil sketch I made on his
final evening, as he lay quietly on my lap, just click on
the thumbnail view here.
Here's
a pastel image, which I drew while I was in college. It's a
tongue-in-cheek takeoff of the famous Headless
Horseman, and was based on a magazine parody
illustration I had come across. With the jack-o'-lantern up
on the horseman's neck, the idea of putting a football in
the rider's right hand, about the way a player might
actually run with one, seemed to be a clever idea at the
time. By now the original, which is about 11" x 17", is
showing some signs of wear. I retouched just a few of the
worst smears in the dark sky and orange moon (pastel isn't
very durable, after all!) after scanning the original
drawing, and the final quality's surprisingly good.
Notice the distinct look of soft pastels
and pastel pencils on charcoal paper. And that odd
"curlicue" near the bottom left is how I usually signed my
stuff back then, my initials stylized into a visual pun on
the symbol: @.
Before
completing the above Headless pastel I was trying to teach
myself how to capture the feeling of light and shadow
interplay in a drawing. It was as far as I got into an
"Impressionistic" phase of the engrossing hobby of drawing.
My dad used to collect a lot of illustrations and
photographs that he also used as reference for much the same
purpose for his drawings. We were sort of two amateur
artists trying to learn from and with each other. A lot of
pleasant memories there for me, you bet. One of the
reference color photos we came across showed a young woman
sitting in Central Park, holding a bright pink balloon. The
parts that caught my eye were the strong backlighting and
soft focus background -- not so easy to draw...
Ah-HA! This would make
a most engrossing study, to try to draw a reasonably
faithful version of the photo, using the pastels and pastel
pencils, again on charcoal paper. I'd completely forgotten
about this image, until a couple of weeks ago. While digging
through some tall thin papers and cardboard and books, I
discovered a matte frame my dad had given me some years ago
when I went to visit both of them. It was while I was
running for the Amtrak, so I hadn't had a chance to look
through all of the small stack he handed me. Somehow this
face down part of the stack escaped me when I got back home.
I'm delighted to find the drawing again, long after the
fact, and discover that it wasn't a bad early effort at all.
I've scanned the 11" x 17", as above, done some mild
cleaning of a few places where the none too durable soft
medium had gotten slightly smeared, and present it to you
above, a click away. Like Rossini's modestly titled late
collection of some of his early music, this is one of the
"Sins Of My Youth." Yup, the same curlicue appears at the
bottom right, explained in the Headless drawing, right above
this one.
But
one early pastel I had not
forgotten about is this, of Princess
Grace of Monaco. It
used to hang in my parent's downstairs rumpus room, as those
suburban miscellaneous spaces were called. I remembered it
as the best color pastel drawing I had done during college,
and would have loved to see it again. My dad and I searched
for it several times, but it seemed to have vanished years
ago. Perhaps it was damaged or taken down when the room was
repainted, and then misplaced. It may even have been
"borrowed" by one of their visiting friends, as some said
they'd like a copy of it. No matter, I never expected to see
it again. That went double when my parents recently moved to
their charming new apartment, and sold the old homestead. It
never surfaced during the move and cleanup.
But I was wrong -- here
it was, carefully filed by my dad along with the above
drawing within the same protective matte frame, face down,
unnoticed for years. He hadn't even realized it was tucked
in the other drawings. Sometimes when you dig around for
other bits you strike a serendipitous chord, and *hey
bingo!* you come up WAY better with what you do find, than
what you were searching for. I greatly admired Grace Kelly,
as many Americans did. Very intelligent and talented, she
exhibited the grace of her name in everything she did. I
love her work with Hitchcock, and he never did again find
anyone who could hold a candle to her, imho. In the US we
all accepted her move to Monaco and into real royalty,
although we missed her presence in motion pictures. It was
an emotional shock when she died in that automobile accident
some years ago.
Back then I had no good
models to pose for me. When I spotted the original photo in
a magazine it seemed a wonderful challenge to draw her
likeness. It was difficult, and my technique grew during the
experience. It's surprising that I can even place the exact
time I drew it. We were downstairs, watching the JFK
Inauguration, during a heavy snowstorm which blanketed the
whole NE, that January 20th. I was working on this drawing
that very day, trying to do two things at once as usual.
Hope it's worthy a smile to see it here, hi-res scanned and
slightly cleaned due to several rubbings and bits of dirt
picked up during 40 years (yikes!) of
storage.
Above
is a recent drawing that I made after learning of the death
of Stanley Kubrick, on March 7, 1999. It's very simple, a
pencil sketch on plain white paper, drawn fairly small so
that it would show up well at smaller size (very large
drawings tend to look like all the detail is missing in
screen-res reproductions, I find). I wanted to post some
observations
about my experiences of working
with this legendary director, and thought a drawing I had
actually made myself, however mediocre, would be a better
personal touch than one of those often-seen photographs.
I'm sorry that I'm not
a better artist, and that I was unable to get the
resemblance quite right, although certainly "it's in the
ballpark"(Stanley loved to use sports jargon.) I tried to
capture him as I remember him, from some time in between
"A
Clockwork Orange"
and "The
Shining", the two
films I worked with him. Later he wore glasses quite often,
his hair got whiter and sparser in front, and with a few
pounds of weight he gained during the final year or two, I
was told by a mutual friend he had begun to look more and
more like Henry the VIII, or even Falstaff, not such a bad
pair of British images, where he lived most of his life. Of
course when he spoke,
what you heard was vintage educated New
York-ese...
Next
is one of my rare older oil-paintings that I still can
locate. It was painted when I was still an undergraduate and
taking an art course at Brown University, taught by
Professor Roberts. I enjoyed the survey of mostly modern
art, getting a better overall idea of which painter or
sculptor followed whom, was influenced by or influenced
whom, and where the usual temporal fence posts could be
erected between the various "schools" and "periods" of art.
The concept and lessons have lasted me a long time. To be
truthful, I'd picked up some of it from my parents, who were
also very aware of art and music and literature. My father
has always enjoyed drawing and studying many mediums of art
at home, so he had a lot of good books I used to enjoy
reading through.
The class ended with a
major class project for each student. You had to propose
something you would make or create, using whichever media
you might choose to work with, and write a short paper to
describe the piece. Those who could not paint or draw could
instead opt to do a nontrivial art analysis, writing a paper
which described their investigations. Since I could draw a
bit, I chose the former. But since Professor Roberts had
always seemed interested in the newest strides, concepts and
media, I tried to aim in that direction, trying something
never done before. What he gave me permission to complete
must have sounded a little mysterious to him, but I was
encouraged to go ahead, hands-on.
You'll see a larger
version if you click the above mini image of the painting.
It also happens to demonstrate something that was right at
the cutting edge at the time, the Retinex Theory of color
vision, developed by Edwin Land, of Polaroid Company fame.
Seen
under a small spotlight
the still life shown here looked to be a perfectly
reasonable color painting. There are tones of red and purple
and yellow and blue and green and orange, as well as neutral
grays and browns. Yet there were only three tubes of pigment
used: red, white and black. You can read all about what's
going on, and get a pretty good impression of this simple
little painting and how it made its own modest contribution
on our new
Color Vision Page.
But don't forget to return here again for the other examples
continued below!
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Photos
In
the mid 70's I got my first really professional camera, a
Rollei
SL-66 2-1/4"
affair, like a slightly bigger and "techier" Hassleblad.
(Rollei still make a version of it, but the price has risen
beyond belief!) I'd found a good condition used 250 mm tele
lens for it shortly afterwards, and was anxious to try it
out. A few friends and I staked out a perfect spot for the
1976 Bicentennial July 4th fireworks display, from the
opposite shore in Brooklyn Heights. The pyro spectacle that
one year was to be set off over the Statue of Liberty, in
keeping with the USA's 200th Anniversary.
I got off quite a few
decent exposures, mostly short time exposures (the camera
was on a large tripod), and above is one of the best. You
can see the statue just below all the flashes and
color-crazed bouquets of light and pomp. Beneath the image
of Miss Liberty note the glint of water in New York's bay,
with a few light trails from small ships which moved
slightly during the exposure. It was a display that was
definitely worth the buildup, and none since has seemed
quite so grand!
I
brought the Rollei SL-66 with me on my second trip to
Australia, in October of 1976. I was with a few other
eclipse chasers (yes, we were successful on that part of the
trip), which by the random odds of the moon's shadow placed
us back in that country in just over two years (June 1974
we'd seen the previous total eclipse from a 727 jet near
Perth.)
Lois Nelson and I were
outraged when it became clear that on this second trip there
were no plans to see any koala "bears". This was shortly
before Quantas had popularized these marvelously plodding
and soft-furred critters, and they were not yet synonymous
with travels "down under". Lois made several phone calls,
and discovered that just northwest of Sydney was
Koala
Park, a preserve
that had most of Australia's marsupials and other unusual
fuzzy-folk in a natural setting open to the public. We hired
a taxi for the afternoon, and sped over the Sydney Harbor
Bridge, grinning like Cheshires.
Despite the Spring
drizzle and a drippier head cold, I had my first decent
close-up look at koalas (they smell like cough-drops, will
allow you to pet them if you have a tempting eucalyptus leaf
in hand, and are certainly not as swift and alert as a
Siamese cat...) We also got a good look at dingoes, wombats,
platypuses, lots of 'roos, and a surprising number of birds.
I used up several rolls of 2-1/4" film. This cute little guy
is from a Cibachrome print I made, currently hanging over by
my trusty old LaserWriter.
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Whimsy
Memorabilia
Dept. -- Two Buttons
Ya'
got me, these buttons aren't something I made, but rather
are two whimsical mnemonics of the time I got them. There
was no other spot on the site that seemed to fit these quite
so well, so here they be. The one to the left below was
handed out to hundreds of us at the Time-Life Building in
NYC, mostly residents who in those pre-cable days couldn't
obtain unghosted television broadcasts among the steel
towers of Manhattan. It was the evening of July 20th, 1969.
A sultry, overcast night fell upon us, as did a few showers,
which only added to the heat and humidity discomfort. Life
magazine had thoughtfully set up a huge projection video
system on the new plaza (which was near completion) for the
public to view the coverage of the first Moonwalk.
Rachel Elkind and I had
a quick dinner midtown, and then walked to the corner of 6th
Ave and 50th, to see if the view on their big screen was any
better than the poor reception back on the small B&W
monitor we had in our studio. It WAS better -- surprisingly
decent, with a clear sound system to complement the fancy
Eudiphor video projection unit. And there, surrounded by a
large, spellbound crowd, we watched Neil and Buzz make their
historic "small steps" for us all, even those who only
gasped and cheered and cried there that Summer's eve.
You know, I've kept
that large button ever since (shown actual size here --
sorry the moon's upside down...), as a memento of what
seemed to be a more hopeful, optimistic time than this
regressive period we are currently doomed to endure while
the decade first, and then century/millennium increment by
one each, in other small steps. (Nostalgia? You bet!)
The much smaller button to
the right above came a couple of years later. I couldn't
find one at first, but a friend saved me one, and this is
it. I'll not soon forget the odd way much of the recording
and music industry "greeted" stereo sound (the operative
word is pronounced: "Feh!"...). We noted a general
reluctance to adopt stereo in many venues through the 60's,
even as those famous wall writings were plain and clear to
see. As Arthur C. Clarke so aptly says: "It
is always wise to cooperate with the inevitable. Better
still, to exploit it!"That's
a dandy -- keep it in mind.
With tongues-in-cheek a
few studios began displaying "Back to MONO" slogans on the
walls in hand lettered signs. We all grinned knowingly. It
was only a matter of time before some enterprising soul put
out these buttons. I heard rumors of several engineers and
producers who claimed credit, like Phil Ramone and Phil
Spector (interesting coincidence -- the two "Phils" --
wonder if they're tenors? ;-), but could not confirm it. As
a droll reminder that progress has NEVER been easy, I keep
this pin/button around, just to maintain perspective. You
might get a smile out of it either way: if it's new to you,
or if this stirs similar memories in your head...
At
Last- It Can Be Revealed!
The
TRUE reason that Quadraphony failed in the
'70's!
As
a joke gift to a CBS Records producer who was championing a
pseudo quad system at the time, CBS's "SQ" (we wanted a true
discrete system instead, a topic for another time), Rachel
Elkind and I put together this absurd contraption. It's a
four-eared quad headphone set, which we called the "Tempi
Quadnaural Earphones" (Two channel phones = Bi-naural, so
four channels = Quad-naural...)
One feature which
wasn't immediately obvious is that once the race has evolved
to have four ears (yes, I drew four of them on the Styrofoam
dummy-head), there will be room only for a single cyclopean
eye. Since this glorious day has not yet arrived, current
homosapiens is presented with a bit of a challenge, as our
young, hammy friend demonstrates on the right portion of the
larger photo version. Anyway, now you know.
Astronomical
Cover-Up!
Sources
inside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed recently that
the lab had agreed to a "cover-up" of sensational images
recently processed at JPL. On the heels of the controversial
"Face on Mars", comes further scientific evidence from the
Clementine Lunar Probe of an even older "Face on the Moon".
Dated as over a billion years old, several features of lunar
terrain clearly form the visage of a face, with two
eye-shaped regions, each hundreds of miles in diameter,
looking skyward, above a surprised expression of some kind
in a region best described as the "mouth". What is it trying
to tell us?
Skeptics say this is
purely an figment in the mind of the viewer, and that all
these formations are a result of natural processes, like
meteor impact craters or lunar volcanism. Proponents counter
that the image seen here (after enhanced new computer
imaging techniques) is evidence of extraterrestrial
construction, proof that our moon was once visited by an
ancient space faring civilization.
In an effort to shed
light on what they call an "awesome discovery and government
suppression of evidence", we are proud to release this
contraband image newly smuggled out via the Net. Details
should be forthcoming on the first of April.
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Via
Computer Graphics
"Take
a Bow", is the title of
the above image. It was drawn in isolated bits and pieces on
white paper with a medium lead pencil, and then these
components were scanned into Photoshop. There they were
toned (some elements got reversed into negative image
versions), layered, and assembled into this final view. The
light effects were added using the Wacom tablet, as well as
the beam of spotlight effect "drawn-in" on the final
composited layers. Some of the clapping hands were scaled
and rotated and copied to obtain several extra versions.
Finally the dimensional text was put together in another
layer and placed on top. The whole thing is part of a "round
of applause" I wanted to send to my friends at
Mark
of the Unicorn
during 1994, when they had just introduced a gorgeous and
significantly enhanced version of Digital
Performer, my
(not so) "secret weapon" in making and shaping music and
audio... And it continues to fascinate, inspire and provide
many of us in these related fields with more powerful
creative tools than we'd ever imagined possible.
"Fires
of the Gods", seen in
the small view above (click it to see a large view, as
usual) is a JPEG reduction of an experimental work involving
Fractal Sets. This time the set was not the usual MandleBrot
Set, but a far less well known one plainly called the "Wayne
Set". Most of the images you can find on this numerical
construct are not nearly as interesting as those on the more
popular set, and it never will supplant it.
Evenso, it does allow
one to create a few rather striking images. I had to explore
for many hours to get the above view, and then I designed a
custom KLUT (color lookup table), to give this nightmarish
image a deep visage, like a lost scene from Disney's
Fantasia.
After generating the high-res version, I popped it into
Photoshop and there made many small handwork enhancements
and retouchings, to come up with what I thought best
expressed the concept I had been trying to get. A few
properties, the "hash" in some of the brighter colors, was
impossible to remove entirely, but the overall effect is
still good. Might make a handsome cover or art piece for an
album someday.
Don't
you just love the look of marbleized papers, the endpapers
you find in beautifully bound books, or as a background
pattern or texture in books and magazine? I always wondered
what this art form was all about, how the lovely intricate,
but systematic patterns came to be. The solution just fell
into my lap when I got the version 2+ update of Fractal's
Painter
program, now available through Corel. The manuals explained
all, including a brief history (in a charming illustrated
bonus booklet -- wonder if it's still available anywhere?)
about this ancient art from the Middle East.
I'd been using Painter
with a trusty pressure sensitive Wacom tablet to create
natural appearing media imagery for a video project I became
involved with in 1993. Later versions have the capability,
too, of course, if less conveniently. I used to keep a
version 2 and also version 3 on CD-R or a HD partition, to
add many neat tools to my Photoshop work. Now I more often
just use Painter X, which is quite good.
This image above uses
Painter and Photoshop, and took some patience to get just
right. It's a polar coordinate mapping of marbleized
features, with unexpected symmetry, all in violet, aubergine
and related cooler spectral tones. It's another image
created while trying to perfect some skills at a new
software feature or two, but now keep around for the dumb
reason that "I like it". You may discover a version of it
inside a new album I'll put out someday. Never can tell.
Better still for now, take a look above, with a click to
enlarge.
P.S.
Just to bring this
description up to date, Painter
was sold to Corel in the early 2000s, and they still
maintain this lovely program. (Metacreations also still has
a page online that links to the newest locations, with some
interesting background info, too.) And my ever stimulating
friend, Kai Krause, who distributed Painter for a few years
after Fractal abandoned it, has resurfaced (yeay). He's been
working on several elaborate new digital projects,
originating from the heart of Europe, with a company called
ByteBurg. Lot's of good people out there!
"World
is my Oyster", above is
a JPEG of an image that is both a visual pun, and a subtle
use of Photoshop trickery. The overall image of oysters is
assembled from scans of several 2 1/4" photos I made here
one dinner, when we were lucky enough to find some fresh
local ones. The fork was photographed separately. The globe
of Earth is a hand-painted version of the famous Apollo 17
photo. I've gotten tired of seeing the same cloud
formations, so did the rendering here "in the style and
spirit of" the original, but all different. The shadow and
many highlights and detail, as with the the Earth globe,
were drawn using a Wacom 6" x 9" tablet, to allow a natural
media look and feel you can't get with a mouse or trackball.
And, oh yes, the idea itself has been hanging around in my
head for a few years, and I just had
to make this image to "exorcise" the thing out into reality.
Here
are two images of the planet Mars.
Hardly anyone seemed to have noticed that in the Summer of
1995 we passed an important U.S. Space milestone. It was the
30th Anniversary of the historic Mariner 4 Encounter with
the red planet, on July 14, 1965. I still remember being at
Columbia University and finding a buzz-on from some people
at The West End Bar on Broadway one evening. The first
images from Mariner were being published in the N.Y. Times.
We all gathered around to look and chat excitedly about this
"giant step", and the future. A wonderful time to live
through, indeed!
Recently, while
searching for something else in an old stack of papers, I
came upon a long-ago set-aside issue of Time magazine from
July '65, featuring the Mariner 4 early results. It
refreshed my early excitement and wonderment. Out of
curiosity I began looking online for more information about
Mars. There's a lot there, more every month. A few choice
sites, maintained by JPL and NASA (starting in the early
90s), post some fine, cogent, Mariner Anniversary
information, and the more recent Martian probe results.
Several sites also store copies of the image databases from
the mid-'70's Viking Orbiter Missions. I downloaded a few
which had the same region as that in the famous picture #11
that Mariner 4 took, and then went at them with my Mac, just
for fun. (If I ever do this again, obviously I'll start with
more recent raw images.)
After
rotating and stitching together three or four overlapping
adjacent images of Mariner Crater (as it's now named), after
carefully manipulating the perspective, scale and angle of
these, I managed to match fairly well a Mariner 4 image I
found in an old astronomy magazine of the original 1965 best
shot, #11 (scanned and fine-tuned). So the B&W
comparison image above is a side-by-side view of what was
first seen by Mariner 4, and what much better cameras took
11 years later, processed with mid-'90's software. The color
image just above is the wider angle view, in near natural
color, that I finally came up with. (Surprisingly, the
newest Mars orbiter images are not much better for this
region.)
The saddest comment on
all of this is that we didn't get back (successfully) for
any closer, clearer images for 22 years after Viking.
Fortunately, there have been several successful probes,
orbiters and landers, since the late 90s. Even so, after
abandoning the achievements of Apollo (we couldn't build an
equivalent to the Saturn Rocket right now if we tried (!) --
the technology, the plans/blueprints and the people who did
it are long gone), the west has lost much its appetite for
curiosity and adventure, for the moment. I wonder what might
bring it back, more spacewalks and a Lunar landing by China,
perhaps...? (Nah...)
Postscript:
We've recently discovered a wonderful new website of NASA's
containing all
of the Mariner 4 images in high res,
and many other historical astro-images collected since then
(this
shot, 11e, is found
on page 2 of the above link). You may enjoy browsing
their whole site for yourself
(bring the kids). Armed with much better raw image data from
the famous pix #11, I thought it would be amusing to
hand-tweak it much like the above earlier versions had been
optimized, and upload it here. So above we have a "new" look
at the same 1965 breakthrough photograph, looking about as
good as it ever will. You'll see there's more detail, and
both highlight and shadow regions are not so blocked up as
before. The visual impression is rather closer to the Viking
based image in the first comparison jpeg. We hope soon to
see some Galileo images of the same location on Mars, and
those ought be truly spectacular! (Update note: and so this
came to pass, and continues to the present, images of the
Saturnian system, rovers on Mars, and a new Mercury probe
currently heading for its close encounter with the planet
nearest the Sun.)
A
few years ago my friend
Linda Livingston at BMI
(in LA) wanted to help me get me back into scoring motion
pictures. I realized that living on the East Coast might be
an obstacle to that, but thought it might be fun to do
another score using some of the new tools and technologies I
already use regularly (got the chance when I scored the
independent feature for some film friends, "Woundings" aka
"Brand New World"). How about some neat exotic tunings for a
sci-fi or horror tale? Or smooth justly tuned harmonies for
a smooth love story? Hmm... okay, we needed some sort of
mailing.
I put together a small
"Press Kit", with a bio and credits, and a cassette of
excerpts-- all the usual. Linda had been making me laugh
with her variation on the line from Poltergeist:
She's Back!, so
as an attention device we came up with this image. I used
Photoshop to combine a scan of Pica in a cute pose, with my
air-brushy drawing based on the promotional cover of the
sequel film. In the process the sweet little girl looking at
the TV set got replaced by the dour back of my adult head,
this time inside the screen with a keyboard. (Well
I thought it was kind of funny!)
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Early
Macintosh
We
got our first Mac in March of '84. I began using it with
MacPaint almost immediately. This is a Christmas card cover
I did, with the four fuzzy critters around a tree. I drew
several versions, and this was the simplest. It was tricky
to draw with a standard mouse and no gray scale pixels! I'm
rather amazed/amused I could still open the file after all
these years, and turn it into a valid GIF format for you to
see!
Much
later, having been customizing the icons on my Mac for years
already (using ResEdit, natch!) I updated these versions in
color. I'm still surprised by how many people who come here
comment on them when they see my screen. Alas, Heather dog's
image on the card above was too large to fit the standard
icon space!
After
reading Arthur C. Clarke's novel version of
The
Songs of Distant Earth,
I wanted very much to compose a music project deserving of
such a fine title. First I wrote to ask Arthur if he'd mind.
Generous to a fault, he said there'd be no problem, and
encouraged me. (The music went on to become
Beauty
in the Beast,
but that's a long story.)
The cover art, when it
was still going to become "Songs of..." was something I
toyed with for a long while, as the music went underway. I
drew this little MacPaint image above to show the people at
CBS what I had in mind at the time. But somehow it never
clicked. Then Mike Oldfield went on to use the same title. A
good idea whose time had come, I guess...
Another aside is that
I'd planned on starting a small record label when my CBS
contract was through (sound familiar?) The logo was going to
be our tiny critter, Pica looking into one of my Grammys. So
I drew that in. I still have the photo I took of her doing
just that, playing "Nipper", on the wall in my studio. Alas,
Tim Page also thought it was a nifty name for a record
company. Catalyst Records lives!
When
our dear friend, LeRoy Doggett, died in April 1996, I wanted
to find this image to put up on the site. Finally I located
it. He was the head of the U.S. Naval Observatory's
Nautical
Almanac Office,
a "Celestial Mechanician" by trade, but also a bright, witty
soul-mate to us, who loved great wine, music, food,
astronomy chats, and horrid puns, not necessarily in that
order!
From the time they
discovered the brain tumor to his peaceful, but tragic death
it was but 5 months. And 54 is way too young, period
paragraph. LeRoy wrought many important changes to keep the
Observatory modern, including the use of Macs, when many PC
snobs thought that GUI
was proof of being "a toy".
One very forward
looking project was MICA,
for Macintosh Interactive Almanac (yes, there's
also a Windows version available, and even DOS/MSDOS, too,
or at least there was for many years). I saw that here was a
way to get most of the information in the Astronomical
Almanac (for astronomers) on a computer screen, but the
graphics were rather plain. So I made this for him, even
though restricted to black or white pixels, only one "bit"
B&W computer imagery (you used random dot "dither" or
halftone patterns to simulate the grays). It became the
program's startup screen, and the cover of the manual. I'm
kinda proud of that for many reasons, now especially.
And
I also contributed these color icons for MICA, a few years
later, when color (and grayscale) finally had become
available. The original "splash screen" has remained the
original small B&W image above. I think LeRoy would
approve that I show them now to you.
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