The Owl­men of Maw­nan
Hand­col­ored cop­per etch­ing on paper
12“x16“
2010

From the group exhi­bi­tion ‘As It Was Before’, now on dis­play at Gallery Hijinks

A being seen near Corn­wall in Great Britain in the 1970s, the Owl­man was described as a grey winged humanoid with red glow­ing eyes. Two girls camp­ing by the Maw­nan Church were the first to describe the beast, which was said to cry out in a hiss­ing call before fly­ing straight up and into the night sky. The being appeared in and around Corn­wall a hand­ful of times over the fol­low­ing years, each time leav­ing wit­nesses strug­gling to com­pre­hend what they had seen. Some main­tained the strange crea­ture could only have come from another dimen­sion, a super­nat­ural angle sup­ported by the sup­posed exis­tance of pow­er­ful Ley Lines in the region.

I’ve wanted to do a print about this story for a long time, as I’ve always had this juve­nile need to see stuff like this for myself. Some­thing about this story and the sim­i­lar Moth­man leg­end from the US always ter­ri­fied me grow­ing up. The eye­wit­ness descrip­tions were so spe­cific, yet told of some­thing hor­ri­fy­ing and unreal, and sim­ply couldn’t be any­thing but what the wit­nesses described.

‘The Ley Lines’, pre­view from ‘As It Was Before’
Graphite on book page.
5“x7“
2010

‘As It Was Before’
Todd Free­man, Mar­tin Machado and Alek­san­dra Zee
Opens Jan­u­ary 8th at Gallery Hijinks, 2309 Bryant, San Fran­cisco, CA
http://www.galleryhijinks.com

A selec­tion of 18th cen­tury engrav­ings from Nozeman’s Ned­er­land­sche Voge­len. Like so many other Euro­pean nat­u­ral­ists of the era, Nozeman’s prints are dif­fi­cult to see repro­duced as a proper vol­ume, and are instead rel­e­gated to antique deal­ers and auc­tion houses. Cor­nelius Nozeman’s doc­u­men­ta­tion of Euro­pean birds pre-dated Audobon’s efforts by about 50 years, but share Audobon’s mas­ter­ful detail, con­trol and design. After his death in 1786, Nozeman’s work was then con­tin­ued on by Mar­t­i­nus Hout­tuyn. A com­pre­hen­sive guide to the birds of the Nether­lands was com­pleted around 1829. The prints here date roughly from 1770 to 1829.

18th cen­tury bird engrav­ings from Cor­nelius Nozeman’s clas­sic Ned­er­land­sche Vogelen.

I’ve been dig­ging for more Hum­boldt stuff, found these 19th cen­tury com­par­a­tive ref­er­ence maps via the superb “Bib­liodyssey”

Hydro­log­i­cal and Geo­log­i­cal sur­vey maps by Alexan­der von Hum­boldt, 1769–1859

“Everything has been cre­ated out of sea-mucous, for love arises from the foam”- Lorenz Oken

Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) has long been one of my sin­gle favorite image­mak­ers. A ded­i­cated sci­en­tist of nat­ural his­tory and med­i­cine, Oken also pro­duced hun­dreds, if not thou­sands of immac­u­lately ren­dered engrav­ings. While many sub­jects were faith­ful to their real­life coun­ter­parts, many were cre­ated only from descrip­tions and second-hand mem­ory, allow­ing for lots of charis­matic rein­ter­pre­ta­tions. His five tiers of lifeforms:

1. Der­ma­to­zoa, or inver­te­brates
2. Glos­so­zoa, or fish, those ani­mals in which a true tongue makes, for the first time, its appear­ance
3. Rhi­no­zoa, or rep­tiles, in which the nose opens for the first time into the mouth and inhales air
4. Oto­zoa, or birds, in which the ear for the first time opens exter­nally
5. Oph­thal­mo­zoa, or mam­mals, in which all the organs of sense are present and complete

Although some of Oken’s cat­e­gor­i­cal group­ings got pretty wild, many of his ideas on nat­ural his­tory tax­on­omy were incred­i­bly solid and were pre­cur­sors to mod­ern bio­log­i­cal the­o­ries– notably his insis­tence on a ‘sim­ple polyp’ being a base-form for all life. I haven’t been able to find a lot of infor­ma­tion about his seven vol­ume work “All­ge­meine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände”, but given the scope of that project I think there were prob­a­bly sev­eral unnamed engravers work­ing on it. The images here are all cred­ited to ‘Oken’ or ‘Oken­fuss’ (his actual name), and are very in keep­ing with the tight style of the time. Hope­fully, some pow­er­house pub­lisher like Taschen can make a gor­geous cof­fee table book some­day, until then I’m left scour­ing Euro­pean print dealer list­ings on ebay.

Some things I saw at the Grand Rapids Pub­lic Museum.