Sunday at the Zoo

i-88300e967bc182d3d434c3ee7a753f87-natlzoopod.jpg
Artist unknown (National Zoo)

Today I visited the Invertebrate House at the National Zoo, where I saw this remarkable churning, twisting portrait of an octopus. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the name of the artist. The painting looks like acrylic or oil, and is about six feet tall - very impressive, but not as impressive as the real giant octopus across the room!

More like this

Kate was attending a workshop run by the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG, a wonderful acronym) in Washington, DC this Wednesday and Thursday, and when she told me that, I said "Hey, I'm not teaching this term, why don't I tag along?" So, we extended the trip a little bit, and made…
Good idea: the National Zoo is letting us name its Giant Pacific octopus. Bad idea: the names. All four are terrible: Olympus: This octopus arrived at the Zoo just before the 2010 Winter Olympics, and for many zoogoers the octopus gets a gold medal for being a compelling animal.Ceph: Octopuses…
By now you might have read my two previous articles (part I, part II) on the assorted tetrapods I encountered in Libya last month. Here's the third and final part in the series [image below shows chital at left, melanistic fallow top-centre, nilgai bottom-centre, blackbuck at right]. It's a bit…
"Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil." Oil painted onto a slab of shale that the artist's wife found discarded from a roof in Toronto. Copyright Glendon Mellow. The Flying Trilobite blog was started two months ago by 32-year-old Glendon Mellow, a Toronto-based painter who's inspired by evolutionary…

Beautiful painting. A fine expression of the style as exemplified by Charles R. Knight who was so well known for his paleo-illustrations of the 1st half of the 20th C. I'm not sure if there are any in DC but I've been totally in love with his work since I would spend hours absorbed by the displays at the Field Museum in Chicago where some of Knight's finest examples exist(ed). His work has become a bit dated and I'm afraid it's getting covered over with fat photo lush super graphics with modern interpretations of the paleoworld, and as fine as they are, they seem like just so much special effects....Knight, for me, transcended that and made the paleoworld one in which I could live.

Next time I'm in DC I will hope to see this upclose. Cheers, doug