The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: illustration

  • Dream of the River

    Dream of the River

    “I have a story to tell you and it has two characters, the river, and the salmon.” New writing, maps and sketches by California-based poet and painter Obi Kaufmann.

  • Endlings: Drawing Extinction

    Endlings: Drawing Extinction

    There are many different approaches to drawing animals. In particular there was a shift in the 19th century away from French idealism towards an approach, led by British artists such as Edward Lear, that prioritised drawing direct from nature. The work of Amy Dover, a fine artist and illustrator based in Newcastle, England, draws upon…

  • Keep the Ink Moving

    Keep the Ink Moving

    The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…

  • Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children

    Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children

    Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein’s monster. The Capitoline Wolf. Mary Shelley. Four names, four figures forming a strange kind of family, if we can call it that. Perhaps better to say, ‘a pack’. Each is linked to other in a lineage of imagination, creation, or birth. There is a shared marginality. Each was believed somehow to have…

  • Asterisk

    Asterisk

    High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…

  • Great and Small Mythologies

    Great and Small Mythologies

    Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes a mural painted by Daedalus, the mythological artist, which fails in its attempts to represent the death of his son, Icarus. In Heaney’s translation: ……………………………………………………………….Twice…

  • Little Island Press

    Little Island Press

    Little Island Press is an independent publisher of new and classic poetry, fiction and international literature in translation. Inspired by some of the amateur presses of the 1920s, Andrew Latimer founded Little Island Press in 2015. Its output spans three different series: Memento, which presents the work of overlooked modern poets; Transits, which offers poetry…

  • Lines in the Ice

    Lines in the Ice

    Human Marks in the Ice Ships fighting against a freezing sea. Masts and ropes caked in ice. Crews of men hauling sledges over crumpled and broken landscapes. These are the mental images conjured when many think of the Arctic and the history of its exploration by Europeans, Russians and Americans. However, this is not the…

  • The Paper Zoo

    The Paper Zoo

    Choosing to draw: philosophy and aesthetics Whatever else the Romans may have done for us, teaching us to draw was not one of their gifts. The two great works of classical scholarship on animals were Aristotle’s History of Animals, and Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia. Neither Pliny nor his Greek predecessor included any illustrations in…

  • The Barometer of My Heart

    The Barometer of My Heart

    On 20th February 2002, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, philosopher Jacques Derrida asked an audience of students the following question: “The phallus, I mean, the phallos, is it proper to man?” This question opened the eighth session of a series of lectures given by Derrida between 2001 and…

  • A Field Guide to East London Wildlife

    A Field Guide to East London Wildlife

    Humans are not the only species undergoing a process of urbanisation. It is well documented that we have made a mess of this planet, and – depending on who you speak to – it may be too late to do anything about it. But as the world gradually turns to concrete, and species extinction continues…