Ironwork: II

As mentioned in a previous posting, I have long been inspired by beautiful ironwork. This lamp in Charleston, South Carolina was interesting with its iron scrollwork and the shadows it cast, so I did a drawing (on right): Wrought iron, 2008 - pencil on paper, 19" x 24".

It's funny -- I have had books on blacksmithing on my bookshelf for years, but it wasn't until recently that I realized that I wanted to understand better the skill required by taking a class and trying my hand at it. In retrospect, it was obvious that I should have tried it much earlier; makes me want to pursue all those other topics on my bookshelf....

To that end, I had the good fortune of being accepted into and taking a wonderful ironworking/ blacksmithing course at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, on Deer Isle in Maine.

I highly recommend the school if you can make the time (view from the dining room on the right). I had a great couple of weeks learning how to move hot iron. Interestingly, ironwork is very similar to working with clay -- both crafts require moving material at the right time and when the material is appropriately pliable. Steel flows so easily when it is hot -- but its buttery consistency quickly becomes more challenging to work with if one takes too much time to work with a hammer. My fellow classmates were a joy to work with and we all inspired each other to greater efforts and countless hours and late hours in the studio and at the forge. We had the good fortune of being taught by Marc Maiorana (check out his beautiful iron designs at www.irondesigncompany.com - and the beautiful spatula below) and he helped us all forge a strong bond together.

In my mind, an ideal spatula -- forged by our teacher Marc Maiorana
Image: Copyright © 2008 - 2009 by Iron Design Company. Used by permission.

It was amazing what we learned in a short 12 days -- we went from hardly being able to form a taper and not knowing what most of the tools in the studio were, to banging out some tenons for mortise and tenons joints on the power hammer in two heats. A nice change! A forge is definitely in my future at some level.

Marc demonstrating how to forge-weld a loop of steel back on itself.

On the 4th and 5th days, I made a couple of trivets to practice making mortise and tenon joints.

View from Haystack on a misty morning.

My interest in designs inspired by the lamp in Charleston and its curvilinear nature was able to come out in a hanging sign bracket that I decided to design and make over the last couple of days there. It went from a rough sketch on paper to a full-scale chalk drawing on the ground of the studio, to actual pieces being put together. I was happy with the way it came out. Now all I need is a place to put up the sign....

Working on rolling up one of the ends.

Here are all the pieces laid out on the chalk drawing on the ground to check the shapes.

Marc and I hammering the rivets in to hold the whole thing together.

All finished with the paint drying. Now it just needs a sign to hold.

Finding inspiration while sailing

I have been away from the computer for most of the last couple of months, but I have been lucky enough to get great inspiration from some of the experiences I have been having.

For most of May I helped sail a boat, Volpaia, up from St. Maarten to Newport, RI by way of Bermuda. She is a Swiss flagged vessel with great lines who sails beautifully. Sailing a 68' sailboat thousands of miles for many days on the open ocean hundreds of miles from land gives great opportunity for thought. We had some beautiful sunrises and sunsets, moonrises and moonsets, beautiful weather, bad weather, calm seas, and strong winds and rough seas. We saw turtles, dolphins, jellyfish, Sargasso weed, Bermuda Longtails, and many other birds and fish.

Volpaia at dock in St. Maarten

Sailing away from St. Maarten on the evening of May 6, 2009. We were heading into 10' seas and a rough first 36 hours. No pictures for a couple of days.

Sunrise on May 9, 2009 -- I was on watch from 4-8am, noon-4pm, and 8pm-midnight. My sunrise watch was the best!

and moonset on the other side of the boat -- we had the benefit of a full moon passage -- lots of light at night really helps to see big waves.

sunrise later that same morning - I'm the only one awake to see it.

We passed another boat (white dot in the distance) also heading to Bermuda May 9 -- 360 miles to go. Sargasso weed in the foreground.

Bermuda Longtails investigating the mast of Volpaia at dawn on May 10, 2009. 200 miles out from Bermuda. We are the only thing for miles and miles, so any bird in the neighborhood comes to see what this strange thing sticking up from the ocean is.

St. David's lighthouse as we were coming in to Bermuda on May 11, 2009. We had to slow down in the night to get there at a reasonable hour.

Church Bay on Bermuda's South Shore -- good snorkeling here.

Cyrus at the helm as we sail out of Bermuda on the morning of May 15, 2009.

At sea about 50 miles north of Bermuda on May 15, 2009. We headed straight north before heading west to Newport to avoid meeting a cold front coming off the east coast head on....

Still weather at sunrise on May 16, 2009. The wind and rain of the cold front awaits us a couple of days from now. Enjoy the sunshine while it lasts....

We passed lots and lots of Portuguese Man o' War siphonophores (Physalia physalis) in the ocean (wikipedia link). There is concern that jellyfish and organisms like this will become much more prevalent if we continue to kill their natural predators....

Flat calm.

Amanda just before sunset on the 16th.

We took a slight detour to fish something shiny out of the ocean a quarter mile off our course.... It turned out to be a Hannah Montana balloon. At least we got it before a sea turtle tried to eat it. Brooke is wearing a coat for the first time in about a year and a half... Evening on May 17... it is getting chillier.

As we were eating dinner on deck on the 17th, we were visited by a pod of 15-25 Common dolphins, Delphinus delphis. They rode our bow wave for a good 15-20 minutes. It was awesome.

I'm taking a photo of the rest of the crew all decked out in the boat's foul weather gear! The high winds and icy rain have subsided after 24 hours.... It was rough enough and rainy enough that I didn't want to drag my camera out into it.

Amanda and me at sunset.

Sunset on the evening of the 18th. Nice to see the sun again as it is poking out under the back edge of the front.

Another sunrise on my 4am-8am morning watch. We're getting close to land -- Nantucket is just over the horizon to the north -- lobster pot flag in the foreground. We're sailing very slowly now, to avoid coming in brutally early.

Mmmmmm coffee. Land ho.

Cyrus at the helm as we come into Newport on the morning of May 19th.

Coming into Newport, RI with our quarantine and US courtesy flags flying.

US Botanic Garden (1): carnivorous plants

I have always enjoyed plants. It is funny: even with an extensive background in biology, plants have not been a part of my training. In US graduate schools, there is a sharp divide between molecular and organismic biology; as I was on the molecular biology side of the divide, the action of higher plants and animals was basically deemed irrelevant. In molecular biology, especially as I didn't study the model plant organism Arabidopsis, there was no mention of plants since a very basic biology class in college. I have been trying to remedy that recently. I am lucky that I live pretty near the US Botanic Garden here in DC, so that I can go and visit to find inspiration and more subject matter for drawing.

Nepenthes x ventrata, 2009.
Pencil on paper; 9" x 12".

The drawing above is of a plant in the Nepenthes genus. Nepenthes are carnivorous plants from the old world tropics. There are also carnivorous plants in the new world (e.g. Sarracenia species), with native species reaching up into North Carolina, Virginia, and beyond.

The evolution of carnivorous plants is interesting. One of their adaptations that has been selected for over the generations is the ability to get nitrogen not from the soil, but from insects and waste from insects and mammals that falls into their open pitchers or cups. Nitrogen is limiting in most environments, so there is a large selective pressure to obtain as much nitrogen as possible so that DNA, RNA, amino acids, and proteins can be made. Some plants (legumes, for example: peas, beans, clovers, alfalfa, soybeans) have evolved symbiotic relationships with bacteria that live in nodules in their roots to break apart atmospheric nitrogen and make it into a form that they can use (with the beneficial side effect of making more nitrogen than those legumes then consume, increasing the fertility of the soil). If mutations to your DNA over the previous countless generations have not conferred the ability to live in a mutually beneficial relationship with bacteria to get you nitrogen (for which you provide sugar from photosynthesis (6CO₂ + 6H₂O + light ---> C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ // ie, 6 carbon dioxides, 6 waters, and light gives you one sugar and 6 oxygens)), you must have some other advantage that can be selected for to enable you to compete effectively in a low nitrogen environment, otherwise you won't succeed.

The adaptation that has been selected for in carnivorous plants is a powerful one, and has been reached by plants in vastly different reaches of the world, a good example of convergent evolution. If you can absorb nitrogen from insects, it allows you to grow in areas that may be plentiful in water, but low in nitrogen -- many of the Sarracenia pitcher plants live in bogs and other low nutrient environments (more on carnivorous plants here).

The Nepenthes species drawn here, Nepenthes x ventrata, is a naturally occurring hybrid between two species of Nepenthes, N. alata and N. ventricosa. It is easy to grow in greenhouses and was one of the pitcher plants on display in the Jungle habitat at the US Botanic Garden in March 2009. The Botanic Garden has many more carnivorous plants and there are always some in the "Plant Adaptations" room, as an example of adaptations selected to obtain nitrogen from the environment. I chose to draw the cup of the plant -- the cup is a modified leaf and the tendril that supports the cup grows out of the end of another leaf (not shown). As seen in this drawing, the tendril often forms a loop, with the potential benefit of being able to wrap around another piece of plant to support the weight of the cup. The rim and top third of the inside cup is waxy, selected because it is slippery, which makes it more likely that insects will slip inside the cup. The middle third typically has hairs pointing downwards to impede the escape of struggling insects, and the bottom third has water and digestive enzymes so the plant can digest the insect and absorb nutrients.

I was inspired.

Color: part 1

It was a beautiful sunny winter day out by Montauk Point Lighthouse (no traffic on the way out there, and no crowds while there -- a huge bonus) and the gulls were skimming the waves and riding the wind currents that pushed up over the bluff on which the lighthouse rests. It was a little after noon, but even with the sun at its highest point, its low angle gave that distinctive quality of winter sunlight. The sky looked especially blue behind the white gulls and the sunlight was highly reflective off the feathers.

It seemed like the only way to make the gull stand out appropriately on the paper was to use color. It was my first foray into color, and an enjoyable one. The sky was darker blue above the gull and lighter down towards the horizon, which allowed me to experiment with combining some of the shades of blue in my pencil collection. It is always interesting how after such an exercise one sees things differently -- both other things in nature and other people's artwork. The "how would I do that?", or the "how did they do that?" question. The blue sky offset the gray, white, and black markings on the gull nicely and I didn't have to worry about colors in the main focus of the drawing.

Herring gull, 2008.
Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 5" x 7".

One of the things I enjoy about this kind of drawing is that I then get to find out interesting things about the subject that I was engaged by. Although I wasn't aware of it before, many of the gulls by the shore, even though they can look markedly different from one another, are actually the same species (see photos in link below). Herring gulls take four years to reach adult plumage and the plumage on this bird indicates that it is three years old. It still has some juvenile markings under its throat (the darker feathers), but its body is mostly white feathers now. The intermittent dark feathers on its throat made it much more interesting to draw.

For anyone interested in further reading, Cornell's ornithology department has useful information out on the web; there is an interesting page on birds molting with a useful set of images on herring gull molting at the bottom of this page.

Holiday newsletter, 2008

I have recently sent out a booklet to friends, family, and supporters for whom I had addresses. I thought that I would post the text of my writing, with the pictures embedded, in case anyone online was interested, but I didn't have their physical address. Thanks! (If you would like a copy, I might still have one I could send you!)

Dear supporters, friends, and family,

Thank you for taking the time to look through this booklet that I have put together to show some of the work that I’ve done in the last year and a half, since changing careers to engage my interests in developing artwork of things that I find beautiful and inspiring. It has taken some time to come to grips with a new career path (not helped by the ongoing recovery from being hit by a car in May 2007), but the range of possibilities that awaits me is very exciting. In these last 18 months, I have started to explore a few themes and I am looking forward to expanding those with more and larger works.

I have been inspired by beautiful things. Some of these are works of nature - fossils, skeletons, and living animals. Others display our potential to create things of great craftsmanship and beauty - cathedrals, castles, lamps. Drawing all these objects helps me to see them in a different way, and each of them generates currents of dreams, thoughts and reflections.

I find drawing fossils particularly thought provoking. One of the great challenges that we face is the rapid change in climate that we are causing. We are and will continue to cause the extinction of many organisms, with the potential to eliminate ourselves in the process. I am hopeful that we will be provoked into serious action and that our intellect will be enough to dodge this danger. But other great and fearsome animals that ruled the earth in the past went extinct – albeit not through their own efforts. Their skeletons are a good reminder to me that apparently powerful things can go extinct.

I’ve done three drawings of dinosaurs in the past year – shown on the cover and as you turn to the next page; the skeletons themselves are on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, but if you always wanted a dinosaur and didn’t have the space… originals of two of the drawings are still available, as well as reproduction greeting cards and posters (here).


I love the detail and craftsmanship in old carvings and stonework. Trevi Fountain in Rome is amazing in its entirety, but I found that spending time to look at the detail was very rewarding. Old stone castles – Edinburgh, in Scotland, and the tower in Vernazza, in Cinque Terre, Italy – were ones that I saw in the last year. They have so much detail to them, which I have tried to portray, both in the small drawings themselves, but also by looking closely at the gargoyles. I have many more images that I would like to draw from both places, but I would also love to go and spend some time drawing other castles. A friend gave me a great book on castles as viewed from the air last year for Christmas – some of those are on my list of places to visit. Places and objects of religious significance, whether old stone churches and cathedrals in Europe, or Shinto temples in Japan (I haven’t drawn any of those, yet), or Aztec, Mayan, or Incan relics, are often great examples of craftsmanship. I was impressed by the gargoyles towards the top of the tower of the cathedral in Bern, Switzerland (you have to peek out the archways of the narrow steps as you climb the bell tower). St. Jude’s church, which is near my sister’s apartment in London, intrigued me partly because the stonework on the steeple is slowly degrading.

I find it particularly poignant when beautiful buildings are falling down for lack of recent upkeep, given the amount of effort their creation took in the first place. On a lighter note, I stumbled across a statue of rabbit in a niche over the entryway of a friend’s house. The entryway looked like the entry to a temple for the worship of rabbit gods. I then discovered that actually, rabbits were worshipped by the Aztecs. They had 400 rabbit gods, for these are the gods of drunkenness; according to Aztec mythology the rabbits gathered together for divine parties. God #2 is the leader. (God #5 is the god of hangovers - he may be receiving much worship during the holidays.)

There is also great craftsmanship in lighthouses; they are an impressive combination of strength, utility, and elegance. Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, in Bermuda, is visible from almost the entire island (and its light is easily visible from the ocean all around). It’s a great example of a hugely tall lighthouse that was only possible after the transition from stone to cast iron. I enjoy watching the path of light sweeping out from a lighthouse, especially on a slightly humid night; I tried to capture some of the feeling of the beam of light approaching in my drawing. New England lighthouses are often squat, stone constructions. The one at Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island is made of sandstone blocks, has a beautiful iron railing, and the multi-pane windows around the lamp were nicely challenging to draw.

I am also (obviously) intrigued by animals. Whether it is the beauty of the Golden Lion Tamarin (and they almost always give birth to twins, how cool is that?) – coupled with the sadness of its imminent extinction – there are only about 500 to 1000 left in the wild, whether it is trying to capture the dappled coloring and the sunlight reflecting off the backs of deer, or whether it is trying to get across in a two dimensional static drawing the different characters that different bird species have, there is so much potential for beauty. For anyone who doesn’t have a cat, I would highly encourage them to put up a bird feeder where they can see it from a window. Watching birds and seeing the different methods they use to approach the feeder, to feed, and how they watch for predators, is immensely satisfying and endlessly entertaining.

As I write this, I realize that one theme that I have been exploring with my work is the combination of strength with gracefulness. Whether that is displayed in a corner of a building, the curves of bone in a dinosaur, or the porcupine fish that I drew in the aquarium at my gym: he looks so happy, cute, friendly, and peaceful as he floats around, but he is an aggressive predator with a great set of spines – I find it intriguing. I think that we are at our best when we create things of beauty from otherwise dull and cold materials. One of the features of wrought iron that makes it so interesting is that there is great effort (indeed, part of the point is) to make the work look elegant and light. I think that the lamp I drew in Charleston, South Carolina has that quality; the shadows from the angle of the sun were just an added plus.


If you are interested in following my work as it progresses (or if you were interested in buying a piece, but it has already sold), I post new drawings online at: http://www.nicholasjudson.com. I have also recently started documenting some of my thoughts behind the artwork at: http://nicholasjudson.blogspot.com. For anyone who is interested, subscribing to the blog with a newsfeed aggregator will provide a convenient way to automatically see new work that I have finished.

Many thanks for supporting me in this endeavor -- whether that support has been moral, word of mouth, or financial, it is all greatly appreciated. Your financial support has been crucial to allow me to continue creating works that inspire me and, I hope, you. On the last pages of this booklet, there is a listing of the artwork that is still available for sale, along with the first set of reproductions that I have had made – greeting cards and posters. If you are interested in buying any of these items, you can either write back to me at my mailing address on the front of this letter, by email, call me on the phone, or place an order through my website: www.nicholasjudson.com/purchase.
If you like the work that you see here, but have something specific in mind that you don’t see represented, I also do commissioned work and would be happy to talk more.

Thank you for reading and have a great holiday season,

Nicholas