A Tale of Two Tables

Back in 2006 Mr. Green and I moved in together. We needed some furniture and, being graduate students, we decided to purchase everything from Ikea. Good idea, right?

Wrong. After about five years, all our Ikea furniture started to expire. The first incident involved a dinner party where, in the middle of the meal, one of our chairs cracked in half. Dine in our apartment at your own risk! Our bed frame barely survived our move last year, and I'm fairly sure that when we move later this month it will meet its final end. Our futon is long gone -- the mattress, "Munkarp," sprung a leak and its lifeblood - little squares of foam - rapidly infiltrated the rest of our apartment, like some kind of fungal infection. I'd say that Ikea is the McDonald's of furniture, but that's kind of unfair to the fast food chain -- at least McDonald's food lasts forever.

One exception has been our two wooden tables, which are still very sturdy. The wood was unfinished, though, and for a long time I was using this really ugly plastic table cloth that was supposed to be 'temporary' until I finished the tables. Which, of course, I never did.

Until now!

So, what does one do with two cheap but sturdy tables? Well, I decided I wanted to paint something on the tables to commemorate our current apartment, of which I am quite fond. I like this place for a lot of reasons. First, we've only lived here for a year, so there hasn't really been enough time for things to break or for us to get incredibly angry at either our neighbors or the building management. Second, I wrote my thesis here. I spent many afternoons thinking about chicken brains and listening to Max the beagle, who lives across the courtyard, rhythmically howl in a simultaneously irritating and endearing way. But what I love the most are the big, shady trees outside our windows. You can sit in the window and listen to the leaves rustle. I love those trees. So that is what I decided to paint on my tables.

The photo on the left is what I used as a source picture for my table paintings.

Now, when it comes to painting I am an enthusiastic amateur. I took some painting classes in high school, which were a lot of fun, and I learned about how you are supposed to paint. There are a lot of tricks and techniques, all of which I have completely forgotten. Hold on to your hats, kids, because I'm about to be rude.

My attitude towards painting and drawing today: Fuck the rules -- embrace artistic chaos!

This attitude means that my paintings/drawings never turn out exactly how I intended, which is part of the fun. To illustrate my technique (if you can call it that), here is what happened with table # 1:

1. I sketched tree branches on the bare wood with fabric markers

2. I plopped on some acrylic paint willy nilly (after having consumed the better part of a bottle of wine)

3. I applied black sharpie to make the painting look slightly less messy (I've never gotten the hang of brush strokes)

4.  I applied three layers of clear acrylic furniture polish so that I can spill my coffee all over it without any concern

And, for what it's worth, BEHOLD! The final product:

Vaguely reminiscent of trees?

Onward to table # 2. Now, when I was working on my PhD thesis this spring, I started creating something I came to call my "thesis wall." Whenever working on the thesis felt too overwhelming (this happened frequently), I would instead focus on my "decal experiment," where I made elaborate tree decals using black contact paper. While I was painting table # 1, I had this great idea: what if, for table # 2, I stuck my tree branch decals on the table, painted over them, and then peeled off the decals so that the natural wood shows through! 

My thesis wall decal experiment - I am 10 years old

So I stuck some of the above branch decals to the table and started painting.  About halfway through painting the table I ran out of white paint, and about 3/4ths of the way through I ran out of blue paint. All I had left was yellow. The table dried, and I peeled off the decals. Lo and behold, it looked really awful!

In an attempt to fix it, I drew some extra branches with fabric markers. But, when I started applying my protective, transparent acrylic furniture polish, the fabric marker ink started spreading everywhere. Oops! So I gave up and started drawing with a black sharpie. Thank goodness for sharpies -- assisting "artists" with limited skills and a "no rules!" attitude for years. 

This is how it turned out:

Ended up looking a little bit like seaweed

Anyway, now I have these two psychedelic tables. Personally, I like them. It is possible that they are tables only a mother would love. But that is OK. No rules, man. NO RULES! 

View from the 84th floor today

!!!

Astrophysics Land

This past Friday, August 10th, 2013, I had the wonderful opportunity of visiting Astrophysics Land, as a good friend of mine was defending his PhD thesis at Northwestern University. I rode up from Hyde Park with my friend and his wife, and I spent some time lurking in the Dearborn observatory.

Photo Source - My friend's office is in the circular room directly underneath the telescope.

His PhD talk was excellent. To orient us in space, he used this really fascinating virtual space map called Chromoscope. If you look at our galaxy using the visual filter you can see little black patches littered throughout the Milky Way. If you switch the filter to "microwave," the dark patches seem to glow. These patches are nebulae, or "cold Galactic interstellar clouds," and within these clouds stars are born.

My friend studies these nebulae, which is pretty rad if you ask me. Even crazier is how he studies them: he goes to McMurdo Station in Antarctica and launches a gigantic helium balloon up into the Earth's outer atmostphere. A telescope and two star cameras are attached to the balloon, which are able to measure the magnetic fields within these clouds of gas. In this way, he is able to better understand the forces that shape the formation of stars.

All this is part of a large collaboration called "BLAST," or "Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope." You can see photos of the expedition here, and I interviewed my friend for the Groks Science Radio Show, where he discussed the issues involved in attaching your thesis project to a giant balloon and launching it into almost-space from Antarctica. It's pretty crazy stuff!

To celebrate his awesome talk and successful defense, I drew a picture in the physics building lecture hall. Here is a blurry photograph of it:

Cupid is a knavish lad, thus to make females mad

Afterwards we spent some time in the Northwestern Shakespeare garden, which is really beautiful. While my friend and his wife relaxed, I wandered around taking pictures. As usual!

Nothing says "Shakespeare" like a barfing lion ...

We celebrated with dinner and cocktails at a vegetarian restaurant, and then walked back to the Dearborn observatory in the rain. I popped upstairs to see the telescope but, due to the clouds, we couldn't look through it. Such a shame - it would have been a perfect end to the day.

Goodbye, Astrophysics Land! And thanks for all the fish stars chickens.

Filtered and proud!

Mr. Green and I are moving up North! And by "North" I don't mean Canada (alas), but to a neighborhood in Chicago that is as North as Hyde Park is South. This neighborhood is Uptown/Andersonville, and so far it seems pretty rad. We were at our new place yesterday evening, and I stepped out for a moment to buy some paper towels and a bottle opener. I encountered a man on the street who told me that I had "beautiful white skin" and asked me if I was married. I also ran into a pleasant middle aged gentleman walking his chihuahua, and a lady at the CVS who had a beard and the most gigantic earrings I've ever seen. I think I'm going to like it there - it's a quirky place.

This morning I woke up early and went for an "au revoir" Hyde Park walk. I stopped off at the Medici bakery for a coffee, and meandered about taking pictures. I love early morning solitary walks because the light is amazing and nobody cares if I spend 10 minutes taking pictures of a single tree (Mr. Green and others find this behavior a bit tedious, understandably).

Here are some of my pictures:

The cat in the left image is called "Marshmallow," and I've walked past her home many, many times. I was glad to see that she is still alive and fluffy.

The photo on the right is of the abandoned church on Blackstone. It is a really impressive building, and it's a shame that they haven't turned it into a farmer's market or something.

The things I love taking pictures of the most include sunlit trees, interesting doors, reflections, and shadows. This means that, because the light is always different, I can walk down the same street a million times and there will be new things to see and photograph. This is one of the reasons why it's so irritating to go on walks with me when I've got my camera on my mind ...

I love the house on the left, which has a grand piano on its ground floor. I've often thought that it would be pleasant to live on the top floor of this building, because you could sit out on the balcony that looks so much like a tree house (to me, at least).

Now, I'm going to go off on a bit of a rant: I really hate it when people post photos online (on facebook or whatever) and brag that they haven't used an instagram filter or edited their image with photoshop. You see hashtags like "#nofilter," or people write, "I didn't alter the saturation at all!" This annoys me for two reasons.

First, I have a fairly archaic point-and-click camera (8.0 MegaPixel Canon PowerShot A580) that I love. My dad bought it for me maybe 5 years ago at Walmart. My camera, which lives in my purse, is a little beaten up. The flash stopped working years ago, which is fine, because I don't use the flash. In fact, I only use the "manual" setting, which I have set for really long exposure times. This is useful for taking blurry night shots and washed-out day shots. So the "raw" images I take are pretty hideous, and look nothing like what I perceived with my eyeballs/brain. It's only after I photoshop them that they look like what I saw. So, in a way, my "filtered" images are more "authentic" than my camera's raw images.

The second reason I hate the "#nofilter" humblebrag is because EVERYTHING IS A FILTER. The camera is a filter but, more importantly, your eyeballs and your brain are filters. To be explicit, you see the world through your eyes and that information is sent to your brain, and each stage of information transfer is essentially a filter. For example, there are only so many colors you can see  because we have only three types of color-receptive cones in our human retina, whereas the mantis shrimp has sixteen types of cones. I can't even imagine what the mantis shrimp would see if it accompanied me on my walk. From the retina, information is passed to the midbrain (sometimes), to the thalamus, and then to the visual part of your cerebral cortex. There, individual cortical areas are dedicated to processing information specifically about contrast, colors, movement, etc. And, somehow, this is all integrated to form the image of the world that you perceive.

So, when I take a photograph, I'm looking at the world through my eyes (filter), taking a picture of something I like (filter) with a camera (filter), importing it into photoshop to reduce the exposure and increase the saturation (filter), and then I post it on the internet so you can look at it with your eyes/brain (filter), and you may think to yourself, correctly, 'OMG that image is so filtered' (filter). This is the reason I called my blog, "The Joanna Filter," because everything that is posted here has been filtered through my brain. Whether it's a photograph, a drawing, or words ... this is what happens when our world is passed through the Joanna filter.

OK, rant over, time to drink more coffee and PACK PACK PACK.