This is a small pen & ink/watercolor of Victorian-era surgeons I did while watching a David Lynch film set during this period. I look at surgery during the 19th century with horror and morbid fascination. It was bloody, brutal and for the most part ineffective. The chances of dying on the operating table were so high that most people avoided hospitals as a last resort. Victorian-era hospitals were unsanitary and overcrowded. Surgeons during this period had very little knowledge or understanding of germs and infection and took a rather perverse pride in having a bloodied apron. A surgeon with a clean smock was seen as inactive whereas a surgeon with an apron covered in blood was considered busy. In fact bloodied aprons were hung on racks for weeks without being laundered and when it was time to get to work they would simply slip the dirty apron over their everyday clothes and go to it.
17th Century Princess
This is a small watercolor I did of a Spanish princess in the early 17th century during the reign of Philip III. I love drawing the ornate, high flaring collars as well as the high boned bodice and full flowing opulent skirts of this extravagant period of nobility. There was a pride in physical beauty and refinement in the art of accentuating clothes that were sustained by the 16th and 17th centuries luxurious materials such as rich heavy garments, thick embroidery as well as sumptuous jewels and fragile, detailed lace. No other period was given more precious adornments to attain the perfection of human beauty. This image is based off the 1615 painting Portrait of a Princess by Sanchez Coello.
Voyager 1
Here is a little watercolor I did of Voyager 1. Scientists are still receiving Voyager dispatches from the unknown that will go silent in the next decade. Voyager spacecrafts left the heliosphere in 2012 and are still under the influence of our sun’s particles and will reach the Oort Cloud in 300 years (a region extends perhaps one-quarter to halfway from our Sun to the next star). When they leave the icy Oort Cloud breaking free of our solar system, they will enter a stretch of interstellar space that does not play by the sun’s rules. There, the sun will become just another star in someone else’s night sky. Its warmth or gravity won’t register, but its glow will radiate for light-years. In all likelihood the Voyagers will still be coasting through the galaxy in 5 billion years and probably long after Earth is gone.
