Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Art, Mimesis and Aristotle

Our word, mimic, is rooted in the ancient Greek term mimesis, which has also entered the English language.  From Wikipedia:  Mimesis, the imitation of life or nature in the techniques and subject matter of art and literature

Aristotle demonstrated that mimesis is the characteristic that distinguishes art from craft--the fine arts from all other productive technologies.  Mimesis is the skill the artist employs to produce a work of art, the representation of specific slices of reality--slices chosen and carefully selected by the artist.  Aristotle develops this view of mimesis throughout the Poetics, and in typical fashion explores just about every aspect of its use in producing art. 

Plato was probably the first to lead Aristotle down the path of esthetics--the study of art.  As was often the case, Aristotle grasped the theme that his teacher introduced and explored it more thoroughly and beyond the scope of anything dreamt of by anyone at the Academy, many times in direct opposition to Platonic philosophy. 

This is the general view--that Aristotle learned much of what he was to later develop from Plato and the philosophical talk at the Academy, a view that I accept only to a certain degree.  There's little evidence that this was always the case, and in his study of art as well as biology there are other factors that probably influenced Aristotle.   He was the son of the physician and--according to tradition--friend to King Amyntus of Macedon (Father to Philip, grandfather to Alexander the Great).  Aristotle certainly had read and listened to performances of Homer and others long before leaving the North.  From early childhood, Aristotle may have spent time at the Macedonian court in Pella, and it's known that Euripides was welcomed there generations before.  With this connection and the possibility of a library of Euripidean works--and maybe some esthetic studies going on at Pella--one can at least speculate that Aristotle learned quite a bit about Greek drama prior to going to Athens.

What I'm working on

I'm 61k words into my current book—near future SF, but I took a six hour break yesterday to paint an idea I've been working with for a while. 

The title of this one is "The Victor", showing a victorious warrior queen after battle with her arm in a "V" for victory, and gravity pulling blood down her sword, dripping on her arm in an upside down "V"—and instead of her arm making a V with a chopping motion (about to chop down an enemy), she's sitting and thinking, holding her head in one hand because it hurts, her sword in the other because she can't let go of it. 

This is another bookcover painting, and it came out of some thinking about the very famous relief sculpture of Athena—called "Mourning Athena". On the left is a picture of the piece I shot in the Acropolis Museum in Oct. 2001.

Here's a sample of "The Victor"--still in progress--with a detail crop and the full work with her army marching up behind her, a city she's sacked in the background.

 

The Library of Celsus at Ephesus

Sorry, I'm just so swamped with work right now, can't even find the time to post anything new.  So, in the meantime, I'm going to pull out some cool shots I've taken around our beautiful world.  Here's the Library of Celsus at Ephesus.  I took this on a trip to Turkey in 2001.

Click for the full view.

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You lookin' for the East Pediment of the Parthenon?

Yeah, I got one of those right here.  You got Athena herself (my all time favorite goddess).  See my "Athena Rocks!" post with an old watercolor. You got Zeus, his brother Poseidon.  The whole damn gang's here.

Anyway, here's the east pediment--click the image for the full size:

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Old Book Images

Free for non-commercial use.  I posted a batch of book images on Flickr, closeups, edge shots, stacked, pages, a couple with USB cords sticking out of the pages. 

These four books are from my Aristotle collection, not all the oldest, but my faves in the group, including a 1550 Madius edition of Aristotle's Poetics, and the big volume below, Operum Aristotelis Tomus II Guillelmo Laemario edition published in Lyon in 1597--I think this is really cool:  the front cover is stamped with the crest of the Duke of Saxony, and the back is stamped with the crest of the Holy Roman Emporer.  Here's the colophon.  The interior shot on the left is from the oldest book in my collection, a Latin trans. of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, printed in Venice on June 25th 1516.  More about this edition here.

Here's the thumbnail block.  Click here to go to Flickr to check them out full-sized.

Great review at Fantasy Literature.net

Love this...

"Seaborn is a unique fantasy; it’s unlike anything else I’ve read. Chris Howard tells a compelling story of merpeople and of two women who struggle to become their own woman (or mermaid) in the face of opposition...Howard does a fine job of describing the beauty and danger of the sea, and the culture of the Seaborn. Their society is largely based upon ancient Greece, as is their magic. Chris Howard clearly knows a great deal about ancient Greek mythology and occultism...

It’s unique, and never feels like a warmed-over version of anything else.  It’s for anyone who loves the sea, and anyone who likes stories about young women striving for independence and their own power..."

Read the full review here:

http://www.fantasyliterature.net/howardchris.html

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Classic

Here's another shot from my ancient Hellas collection, a detail of the "Mourning Athena," relief sculpture (artist unknown, c 450BCE).  Click the pic to see the large view.

Apollo

Apollo (Aπόλλων), the son of Zeus and Leto, brother of the huntress Artemis (they're paternal twins).  (I took this in the museum at Delphi).  Click the pic for the large view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo

Sift and post

As promised, I have spent exactly ten minutes scrolling through 1200 images, and pulled these three nearly at random.  I took these on two different islands, Patmos and Mikonos, and then in Corinthos.

Click on the images to see the large view

Windmills Without Wind

Narrow Path

Corinthian Capital Prototype

Aristotle on the value of biology and Heraclitus taking a dump

Here's Aristotle trying to convince his largely aristocratic students that studying the "less valuable animals," such as fish and rodents and hen's eggs (Not just cavalry horses and lions) is a valuable pastime in itself.  There are things to learn about their actions, the habitats in which they thrive, their eating, sleeping, mating behavior.  Aristotle--before there was a science of biology--had to go out of his way to make it clear that examining all animals and their ways is a worthy exercise.

Read this passage from Parts of Animals (De Partibus Animalium):

(PA I 5, 645a4)  For this reason we should not be childishly disgusted at the examination of the less valuable animals. For in all natural things there is something marvelous. Even as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to those strangers who wished to meet him but stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself at the oven—he bade them to enter without fear, ‘For there are gods here too’—so too one should approach research about each of the animals without disgust, since in every one there is something natural and good.

Here's what's really cool about this passage.  The phrase "warming himself at the oven" is thought to be slang referring to going to the bathroom, i.e., sitting on the pot, taking a dump.  "There are gods here too."  Heraclitus' use of "gods" doesn't refer to actual divinities, but to processes worth discovering, exploring--the idea that some value may be gained by studying what would be considered the lowest of functions of the body.

Of course, another quote--the very famous fragment--from Heraclitus has him saying, "Everything flows..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
http://www.non-contradiction.com/2007/09/on-the-parts-of.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/

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