amudu

Monday, July 23, 2012

Deborah rubin painter

Deborah Rubin paints in watercolor and occasionally acrylic and gouache. She has been pushing the boundaries of photo-realism and hyper-realism since the mid 1970′s with an eye on nature and more recently, architecture. Born in Chicago in 1948, Rubin holds a BFA from the University of Illinois. She currently lives in Western Massachusetts.

My Art
I’ve created art ever since I was a toddler; I never had to make a decision about my career. In 1970 I received my bachelor of fine arts from the University of Illinois and my graduate degree in painting from the University of Minnesota one year later.

While I’m known for my watercolor and gouache paintings, I’m currently dabbling with oils but it’s difficult to stay clean and I seem to step in the paint, smear it and get it all over the place. I typically work from photographs except when I’m on vacation. That’s when I sketch plein air paintings. I often paint with palette, but I do use Naples yellow and Davy’s gray for toning down colors. Sometimes I add black to brown or blue. My students shy away from black having been told that artists are not supposed to use it. I tell them that we must be using it or else paint companies wouldn’t be selling it.

My inspiration comes from everywhere, especially when I walk, bike and travel as a car passenger. I see images that are funny, amusing and powerful in color or simply light and dark tones. My head is constantly swimming with imagery. I tell my students that everything can be transformed into a painting.

Species number on Earth a mystery

JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY

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"Many missing species are hard to find, such as deep-sea organisms, high mountain species or those that live underground.”

Image: guenterguni/iStockphoto

We just do not know how many different species live on earth, according to a new study by a group of international scientists.

“There could be as few as two million species or more than 50 million,” said Professor William Laurance of James Cook University. “That’s how uncertain things are.”

Professor Laurance is co-author of the study published in in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

“Some groups of species — such as plants and birds — are well-known, with scientists discovering relatively few new ones each year,” he said.

“But it is almost impossible to guess how many unknown species of insects and fungi there are.”

Lead author Brett R. Scheffers of National University of Singapore said that what was known was that the unknown species were likely to be living in places where they are in danger of extinction.

“We could lose many of them before we realise how valuable they are,” he said.

The study suggests that many of these species are important for medicine, water purification and provide numerous other services for humanity.

For example, cone snails, which are especially abundant on the Great Barrier Reef, are enormously important for drug development ranging from pain-killers to treatment of neurological diseases.

“Many species of these snails are newly discovered and many more await discovery,” Professor Laurance said.

“We simply can’t afford to lose these species because of neglect and short-sided economic gains,” he said.

Laurance, Scheffers and their colleagues summarise the answers to what may seem like straight forward questions about the Earth’s biodiversity but they warn “these answers are deceptively complex”.

Their report collates information from numerous studies that attempt to estimate numbers and characteristics of unknown biodiversity.

Another co-author, Dr Lucas Joppa at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK said that “many missing species are hard to find, such as deep-sea organisms, high mountain species or those that live underground.”

Missing species are believed to often be small in size and living in small geographic areas, such as high-elevation rainforests in the Wet Tropics of north Queensland.

The authors stress that some major challenges complicate the species-description process. Sometimes two different species are accidentally assigned the same name, or there are animals that look nearly identical and therefore can only be identified by genetic analyses.

Although these challenges present real struggles for future biodiversity inventories, the report stresses that progress is being made.

“New technologies such as environmental DNA analyses can detect a species presence from mere water samples without our ever seeing it,” Mr Scheffers said.

“The crazy thing about all this is that we could have way more than 50 million species if we start counting microbes such as bacteria, viruses and the like,” Professor Laurance said.

“It just shows how much we still have to learn about the diversity of life on Earth.”

Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

The Inverted Tower - Sintra, Portugal

An underground tunnel with a spiral staircase, supported by carved columns, down to the bottom of the well through nine landings. The nine hole round landings, separated by fifteen steps, evoke references to Dante's Divine Comedy, and may represent the nine circles of hell, paradise, or purgatory.

The well is connected to laberíticas caves that lead to a spooky garden surrounded by a lake.

The land that is now Quinta da Regaleira had many owners through time. But in 1892 it belonged to the Barons of Regaleira, a family of rich merchants from Porto, when it was purchased that year by Carvalho Monteiro for 25,000 réis. Monteiro wished to build a bewildering place where he could gather symbols that would reflect his interests and ideologies. With the assistance of the Italian architect Luigi Manini, he designed the 4-hectare estate with its enigmatic buildings, believed to hide symbols related to alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. The architecture of the estate evokes Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and Manueline architectural styles. The construction of the current estate commenced in 1904 and most of it was concluded by 1910.