Naming the Peaks Project: Moving Mountains

My first embodied experience of mountains was in the mid-eighties in France and it left me speechless. We have been living within viewing range of the spectacular Rocky Mountains for over a year now and I am still in awe at the visual phenomenon of recognizing geographical formations with the naked eye, that are hundreds of kilometers away. I was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island where we had rolling hills, fields, harbours, and magnificent ocean views, but no vistas or panoramas that could cover this scale. For reasons I do not understand I have always needed to place my visual world in measurable perspectives and have even learned to map waves and spherical objects in order to draw and paint them with more accuracy.

View Larger Map

This is one of the many Google maps I am working on as part of this project and others. From Calgary’s Crowfoot Public Library Lookout I have added lines to mountain peaks visible to the naked eye in ideal light. These lines indicate the distance. Each peak marker has additional information about the peaks including height in meters. I am hoping to eventually include ranges, subranges and regions as well as brief summaries on the history of naming, etc. (For now I rely heavily on bivouac.com, peakfinders, wikipedia as well as travel, history, geography and photography books). Information panels in national, provincial and municipal parks also provide some information. I am beginning to create and upload to my Picasa albums, icons (resolution 72 dpi, 65 pixels x 65 pixels) from my own digital photos for each peak.

I am struggling with Google Earth as I have overloaded my .kmz files.

Picasa allows me to tag my individual digital images and to place them in digital albums while maintaining separate albums on my PC to enhance findability. Semantic tools used on the Internet are developed on PCs too.

In order to paint the Rockies I wanted to first know where they were in relation to my easel. I don’t know why but I really want to know names of things including their historical and scientific names. Geological formations fascinate me as much as the history of the First Nations whose trails became our highways. I wanted to know exactly where I was and where they are with locational indicators. I wanted to know their height and how they were linked to neighbouring peaks. We became chasers of the light, watching Calgary skies for the best conditions for capturing images of the Rockies. We searched out the best sites for viewing the mountains from here and returned to them often. Most of our pictures were not that great from a photographic or aesthetic point of view. But bit by bit we were able to see more peaks clearly and identify them.

I began to take 180 degree pans even when the light was not great if at least some of the peaks were more visible.

We drove and hiked closer to the peaks as much as we could and continue to do so looking for more vistas and slightly different angles.

Using online and print sources piece by piece small sections came together.

I began to trace the contours of the peaks skyline so I could more clearly see which peaks were farther west, which were closer to us.

I used both Google Earth and Google’s My Maps features to geotag and tag exact peaks. Then I created lines between the peaks and the site from which I was taking photos so I could visualize compass directions.

I used the various mountaineering sites like bivuoac.com to study maps, to learn the language, to situate peaks within ranges, regions and subranges. I gathered descriptive information.

In Picasa I can geotag and label my photos and I have started uploading some of them to my Picasa album.

Using Adobe PhotoShop Creative Suite I create digitage (collages of digital images using .psd layer options) and I add text fields to label peaks and other features that help situate them.

I upload, tag and geotag some of these labeled images to Flickr but I have been disappointed by the low resolution in my free account.

Recently I have begun to upload higher resolution images to my wordpress accounts, including this one.

A group of savvy semantic web experts have created programs to autogenerate similar images! They describe how they align real photos with a synthetic panorama. I guess that is what I have been doing manually. See Technologies of Vision: semantic image labelling, Marmota: Visual Environmental Monitoring. Recently I received this delightful email from one of the researchers-collaborators:

Dear Maureen, I saw your picture and I think it is very related to the mountain labelling tool I’m working on: http://tev.fbk.eu/marmota (as a demo, please look at the photoblog). Can you describe the context of the Peaks’ Project? You are also welcome to add your photos to the flickr group labelledmountains Merry Christmas from Italy, michele

I thought it would be an appropriate time for me to contextualize my own slow world process involved in my “Naming the Peaks Project.”

Naming the Peaks Project in my ocean.flynn Flickr album
Peaks’ Project: From Benchlands,
originally uploaded by ocean.flynn.

Webliography and Bibliography

Technologies of Vision: semantic image labelling

Marmota: Visual Environmental Monitoring

Slow World: Light Changing on Growing Plants

Slow World Background 1440 x 900 res: 300One bud is slowly opening into an apple blossom on a cut branch in a large blue glass vase. I had clipped them in March so I could insert the fast-foward spring green into the acrylic painting I am working on in my living room.

The urgent need to nurture the slow world is heightened after reading the NYT article on the health risk to bloggers who race against time.

Holomorphic forms on blue teapot

I was first introduced to the work of Xianfeng David Gu’s mesmerizing Escher-like visualizations of Computational Conformal Geometry on the jacket design of Spiro, George G. Spiro’s inspiring publication entitled Poincare’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles (2007). It was his visualization of holomorphic (differentials) forms on the surface of a teapot that immediately caught my attention. (I had borrowed the book from the public library because of my fascination with Perelman’s story).

My interest in surface reflections hidden in larger paintings developed into renditions of the reflections, particularly on spherical surfaces, encouraged in part by M. C. Escher’s iconic self-portrait.

In 1999 I began a series entitled Blue teapot where I emphasized the white visual noise/pattern on the highly reflective sephrical surface of a shiny (blue) sphere. Intuitively using laws of perspective I sought the diverse and elusive vanishing points of the spaces behind me, above me and below me as well as the more obvious space defined by Renaissance linear perspective in front of me. I was conscious of the inability of the author/artist/subject to eliminate the presence of the embodied self from the centre of these spheres.

I’ve incorporated this into different paintings since then sometimes creating a self-reflexive miniaturized mise-en-abyme effect.

Webliography and Bibliography

Gu, Xianfeng David. 2006. “Riemann Uniformization using Ricci Flow Method.” http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~gu/tutorial/Ricci_Report.pdf

Gu, Xianfeng David. 2006. “Computational Conformal Geometry Lecture Notes: Topology, Differential Geometry, Complex Analysis” http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~gu/tutorial/ComputationalConformalGeometry.pdf

Gu, Xianfeng David. 2006. “Isothermal Coordinates.” in PowerPoint “Computational Conformal Geometry Lecture Notes: Topology, Differential Geometry, Complex Analysis” http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~gu/tutorial/ComputationalConformalGeometry.pdf

Gu, Xianfeng David. 2006. “Figure 19: Holomorphic 1-forms on surfaces.” in PowerPoint “Computational Conformal Geometry Lecture Notes: Topology, Differential Geometry, Complex Analysis” http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~gu/tutorial/ComputationalConformalGeometry.pdf

Spiro, George G. 2007. Poincare’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles. New York: Dutton/Penguin.

Paint by Numbers: Iqaluit Sky at Dusk

Measuring and mapping the mind, soul and spirit by using mathematics with music, numerical codes on virtual palettes for colours . . .

 

twittering

Iqaluit sunset “#F2D895″ | Iqaluit sunset “#B58D67″| Iqaluit sunset “#FFF6BF” | Iqaluit sunset “#DDA887″ | Iqaluit sunset “#BAA295″ | Iqaluit sunset “#FBE8C0″ | Iqaluit sky at dusk “#4B4D65″ | Iqaluit sky at dusk”#525B7B” | Iqaluit sky at dusk”#545B75″ | “#B7A47C” | Iqaluit sky at dusk “#2B3454″ | “#336699″ |
Bell Lake reflections” #626C61″ | “#666666″ | “#666699″ | Iqaluit Rockface “#B1A08F” | Iqaluit Rockface “#AE8C8C” |
Iqaluit Rockface “#67606F” | Iqaluit Rockface “#DCB9B5″ | Iqaluit Rockface “#D5B4B1″ | Iqaluit Rockface “#EFD3D6″ | Iqaluit Rockface lichen “#9FAD97″ | Iqaluit Rockface lichen”#577155″ | Iqaluit Rockface lichen “#97A493″ | Baffin aerial tundra “#49465B” | Baffin aerial tundra “#C7BDCF” | Baffin aerial tundra “#616079″ | Baffin blue sky “#A8B8DA” | Baffin blue sky “#246AD5″ | Baffin blue sky “#5D7DB3″ | Baffin blue sky “#82ABD5″ | Baffin blue sky “#558AE8″ | Baffin blue sky “#5392E5″ |

Iqaluit sunset “#F2D895″	Iqaluit sunset “#B58D67″	Iqaluit sunset “#FFF6BF”
Iqaluit sunset “#DDA887″	Iqaluit sunset “#BAA295″	Iqaluit sunset “#FBE8C0″
Iqaluit sky at dusk “#4B4D65″	Iqaluit sky at dusk”#525B7B”	Iqaluit sky at dusk”#545B75″
“#B7A47C”	Iqaluit sky at dusk “#2B3454″	“#336699″
Bell Lake reflections” #626C61″	“#666666″	“#666699″
Iqaluit Rockface “#B1A08F”	Iqaluit Rockface “#AE8C8C”	Iqaluit Rockface “#67606F”
Iqaluit Rockface “#DCB9B5″	Iqaluit Rockface “#D5B4B1″	Iqaluit Rockface “#EFD3D6″
Iqaluit Rockface lichen “#9FAD97″	Iqaluit Rockface lichen”#577155″	Iqaluit Rockface lichen “#97A493″
Baffin aerial tundra “#49465B”	Baffin aerial tundra “#C7BDCF”	Baffin aerial tundra “#616079″
Baffin blue sky “#A8B8DA”	Baffin blue sky “#246AD5″	Baffin blue sky “#5D7DB3″
Baffin blue sky “#82ABD5″	Baffin blue sky “#558AE8″	Baffin blue sky “#5392E5″
“#99CCFF”	“#66CCFF”	“#33CCFF”

Azure “F0FFFF”	Bisque “FFE4C4″	“FFCC99″
Blanched almond “FFEBCD”	Cornsilk “FFF8DC”	Eggshell “FCE6C9″
Floral white “FFFAF0″	Gainsboro “DCDCDC”	Ghost white “F8F8FF”
Honeydew “F0FFF0″	Ivory “FFFFF0″	Lavender “E6E6FA”
Lavender blush “FFF0F5″	Lemon chiffon “FFFACD”	Linen “FAF0E6″
Mint cream “F5FFFA”	Misty rose “FFE4E1″	Moccasin “FFE4B5″
Navajo white “FFDEAD”	Old lace “FDF5E6″	Papaya whip “FFEFD5″
Peach puff “FFDAB9″	Seashell “FFF5EE”	Snow “FFFAFA”
Thistle “D8BFD8″	Titanium white “FCFFF0″	Wheat “F5DEB3″
White “FFFFFF”	White smoke “F5F5F5″	Zinc white “FDF8FF”
Cold grey “808A87″	Dim grey “696969″	Grey “C0C0C0″
Light grey “D3D3D3″	Slate grey “708090″	Slate grey dark “2F4F4F”
Slate grey light “778899″	Warm grey “808069″	Black “000000″
Ivory black “292421″	Lamp black “2E473B”	Brick “9C661F”
Coral “FF7F50″	Coral light “F08080″	English red “D43D1A”
Firebrick “B22222″	Geranium lake “E31230″	Hot pink “FF69B4″
Indian red “B0171F”	Light salmon “FFA07A”	Madder lake deep “E32E30″
Maroon “B03060″	Pink “FFC0CB”	Pink light “FFB6C1″
Raspberry “872657″	Red “FF0000″	Rose madder “E33638″
Salmon “FA8072″	Tomato “FF6347″	Venetian red “D41A1F”
Beige “A39480″	Brown “802A2A”	Brown madder “DB2929″
Brown ochre “87421F”	Burlywood “DEB887″	Burnt sienna “8A360F”
Burnt umber “8A3324″	Chocolate “D2691E”	Deep ochre “733D1A”
Flesh “FF7D40″	Flesh ochre “FF5721″	Gold ochre “C77826″
Greenish umber “FF3D0D”	Khaki “F0E68C”	Khaki dark “BDB76B”
Light beige “F5F5DC”	Peru “CD853F”	Rosy brown “BC8F8F”
Raw sienna “C76114″	Raw umber “734A12″	Sepia “5E2612″
Sienna “A0522D”	Saddle brown “8B4513″	Sandy brown “F4A460″
Tan “D2B48C”	Van dyke brown “5E2605″	Cadmium orange “FF6103″
Cadmium red light “FF030D”	Carrot “ED9121″	Dark orange “FF8C00″
Mars orange “964514″	Mars yellow “E3701A”	Orange “FF8000″
Orange red “FF4500″	Yellow ochre “E38217″	Aureoline yellow “FFA824″
Banana “E3CF57″	Cadmium lemon “FFE303″	Cadmium yellow “FF9912″
Cadmium yellow light “FFB00F”	Gold “FFD700″	Goldenrod “DAA520″
Goldenrod dark “B8860B”	Goldenrod light “FAFAD2″	Goldenrod pale “EEE8AA”
Light goldenrod “EEDD82″	Melon “E3A869″	Naples yellow deep “FFA812″
Yellow “FFFF00″	Yellow light “FFFFE0″	Chartreuse “7FFF00″
Chrome oxide green “668014″	Cinnabar green “61B329″	Cobalt green “3D9140″
Emerald green “00C957″	Forest green “228B22″	Green “00FF00″
Green dark “006400″	Green pale “98FB98″	Green yellow “ADFF2F”
Lawn green “7CFC00″	Lime green “32CD32″	Mint “BDFCC9″
Olive “3B5E2B”	Olive drab “6B8E23″	Olive green dark “556B2F”
Permanent green “0AC92B”	Sap green “308014″	Sea green “2E8B57″
Sea green dark “8FBC8F”	Sea green medium “3CB371″	Sea green light “20B2AA”
Spring green “00FF7F”	Spring green medium “00FA9A”	Terre verte “385E0F”
Viridian light “6EFF70″	Yellow green “9ACD32″	Aquamarine “7FFFD4″
Aquamarine medium “66CDAA”	Cyan “00FFFF”	Cyan white “E0FFFF”
Turquoise “40E0D0″	Turquoise dark “00CED1″	Turquoise medium “48D1CC”
Turquoise pale “AFEEEE”	Alice blue “F0F8FF”	Blue “0000FF”
Blue light “ADD8E6″	Blue medium “0000CD”	Cadet “5F9EA0″
Cobalt “3D59AB”	Cornflower “6495ED”	Cerulean “05B8CC”
Dodger blue “1E90FF”	Indigo “082E54″	Manganese blue “03A89E”
Midnight blue “191970″	Navy “000080″	Peacock “33A1C9″
Powder blue “B0E0E6″	Royal blue “4169E1″	Slate blue “6A5ACD”
Slate blue dark “483D8B”	Slate blue light “8470FF”	Slate blue medium “7B68EE”
Sky blue “87CEEB”	Sky blue deep “00BFFF”	Sky blue light “87CEFA”
Steel blue “4682B4″	Steel blue light “B0C4DE”	Turquoise blue “00C78C”
Ultramarine “120A8F”	Blue violet “8A2BE2″	Cobalt violet deep “91219E”
Magenta “FF00FF”	Orchid “DA70D6″	Orchid dark “9932CC”
Orchid medium “BA55D3″	Permanent red violet “DB2645″	Plum “DDA0DD”
Purple “A020F0″	Purple medium “9370DB”	Ultramarine violet “5C246E”
Violet “8F5E99″	Violet dark “9400D3″	Violet red “D02090″
Violet red medium “C71585″	Violet red pale “DB7093″	Violet red medium “C71585″

How to paint mountains: Geomorphological taxonomy

I was never attracted to the paintings of E. H. Hughes while I worked as contract art educator at the National Gallery of Canada. It wasn’t until I lived near his home for almost two years, in the Cowichan River valley area that I began to understand that his work was a highly detailed documentation of plants, trees, geological formations, waterways and marine activity — not an attempt to express the impression of the landscape from a tourist’s point-of-view. The ubiquitous greys of the island from November through March explain the colour-challenged palettes in most of Hughes’ prints. The original paintings are rare since most of them have been sold to a unique collector in Germany. But framed expensive mass-produced prints from the original paintings (which the vast majority of people in the age of Robert Bateman — and more recently high quality giclee¹ — mistake for original works of art) are prominent, particularly in the places like the family restaurant in Duncan called the Dog House.

In Canada plein art painting in cold weather is possible but uncomfortable. This small acrylic plein air sketch was painted in a couple of hours on the windy escarpment at Edelweis Point. The larger version will portray the mountains more accurately. I often find myself fantasizing about knocking on doors of stranger’s homes-with-a-view to ask for three hours of air space to paint in the off seasons. Following in the paths of plein air painters I had made up my own rules that I followed for decades. I would not paint from pictures. But I moved a lot since then. Each new Canadian region offers new visual opportunities and challenges for painting. Even the qualities of light itself, its clarity, luminosity, is different from region to region. I spent a lot of time studying the patterns of waves on the coast of Vancouver Island. Now I am confused, overwhelmed by the mountains. I want to hike their trails and see them from as many angles as is possible with easy 5-hour scrambles. These days I take digital photos on our day trips in and around Calgary to ecological reserves, public parks or even roadside in Cochrane, Canmore . . . Now I find myself painting with a laptop open beside me so that my finished painting becomes a visual tool for memory work, another way of living in and visualizing my everyday world. I also used to feel that selling mass-produced prints was dishonest and deluded an ill-informed public. Now I am just happy to have available images whatever their source or quality to compare and learn: Flickr, Google images, Virtual museums like the National Gallery of Canada’s, reproductions, etc. There aren’t any overpriced framed Giclees of specific mountain peaks from our local shopping mall galleries hanging over the sofa at home, but I will study and compare them as another way of seeing.

As I refine tags and folksonomy in the virtual world, I seek out more precise multidisciplinary taxonomies in ecosystems I inhabit. It informs the way I see, and the way that I take photographs and paint plein air. I tag my images through Google Earth, Picasa and Flickr. Adobe Photoshop provides tools that allow me to enhance or layer some images. Using www.bivouac.com, Peaks of the Canadian Rockies, and numerous other maps, images and texts I can hyperlink each mountain peak to its exact longtitude/latitude coordinates in Google Earth (and or Picasa and Flickr). In Google Earth I can link the altitude tool relative to space/ground with the height of the mountain. I can also link customized image icons and detailed information including the exact www.bivouac.com and/or Peaks of the Canadian Rockies urls. The process of social tagging or folksonomy fuels my interest in searching for the names that provide the most accurate historical, ecological, geographical information about mountain peaks, glacial erratics, medicinal plants, post-contact plants . . .

Google searches before and after help refine our understanding of the places we have visited. Public librairies, local museums and even Tim Horton’s customers provide more suggestions. Sharing using one of our many social networks is easy. Flickr provides tools for describing and commenting on details of images, adding textual information as well as refined folksonomy, geotagging and comparing photos with special interest groups. Google docs archives the unpublished notes, annotated webliographies and bibliographies and keeps track of published blogs.

In the process I learn about contributions to Alberta’s history by individuals and communities descended from First Nations, Chinese, Italians, French, Irish, British, African-Americans . . .

Of course it is a visual form of memory work. If we only relied on the printed word for knowledge claims we would find ourselves with limited perspectives provided by experts in exclusive academic disciplines who claim that their magisteria is nonoverlapping.

This is changing so rapidly in a world of integrated management. Ecohydrology combines the fields of ecological processes and hydrology that informs integrated management of watersheds. Google Earth allows nonexperts to view climatic zones, mountain ranges, massifs, river valleys, individual mountains, hillslopes, stream channels, estuaries, gullies, barchannels, recharge areas, and in some cases meter-sized features. We can fly over and zoom in on the watershed of the Athabaskan Lake and River, Fort McMurray, Fort Chipewyan. We can read related reports online and track changes ourselves. This kind of information has never been easier to collect and share.

The most accurate scientific information from legitimate sources provides exact terminologies and taxonomies² that not only clarify complex issues, they are also folksonomy-friendly.

Footnotes

1. Limited edition archival prints where the editions are limited to a hundred or less of an original work of art and hand autographed by the artist are priced accordingly and were considered to be art collectors items. Robert Bateman is well-known for his high-priced multiple edition prints of his popular wildlife paintings. These are often purchased for a hefty price by uninformed collectors who believe they have an original work of art. With progress in digital technologies, printing inks and processes, giclees from original oil paintings can be printed on canvas that appears to have a varnished finish and priced as much as a unique original painting. Giclees on high quality water colour paper do have an archival life of over a hundred years. Their production is costly so they are priced more than a mass-produced print. Giclee archival prints are a huge improvement over the prints of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr distributed to public schools in Canada in the Post World War II years. Most of these framed prints which unfortunately still hang in public places over fifty years later, have darkened and have lost all semblance to original colours.

I now fully embrace the giclee concept as a way of sharing visual information more widely. It is yet another take on Walter Banjamin’s mechanical reproduction.

2. I looked to wikipedia under geomorphology to find the equivalent of taxonomy for mountains that I have been using to identify wildflowers, medicinal plants. According to wikipedia, “Different geomorphological processes dominate at different spatial and temporal scales. To help categorize landscape scales some geomorphologists use the following taxonomy:

• 1st – Continent, ocean basin, climatic zone (~10,000,000 km²)
• 2nd – Shield, e.g. Baltic shield, or mountain range (~1,000,000 km²)
• 3rd – Isolated sea, Sahel (~100,000 km²)
• 4th – Massif, e.g. Massif Central or Group of related landforms, e.g., Weald (~10,000 km²)
• 5th – River valley, Cotswolds (~1,000 km²)
• 6th – Individual mountain or volcano, small valleys (~100 km²)
• 7th – Hillslopes, stream channels, estuary (~10 km²)
• 8th – gully, barchannel (~1 km²)
• 9th – Meter-sized features”

Creative Commons reference:

CC Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “How to paint mountains: Geomorphological taxonomy.” >> speechless. November 13.

CC Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “How to paint mountains: Geomorphological taxonomy.” >> Google docs. November 13.

NB: This article is supposed to be automatically re-published on speechless as changes are made in Google docs. I prefer to have both references available.