To me, Nature is God. Without it, we simply would not exist. Conserving the world’s natural spaces and the creatures that live there is paramount to the survival of humans as a species, and I have therefore dedicated my life to studying environmentalism in order to help people co-exist more successfully and sustainably with the natural world.
All natural materials I use in my creations are either sourced from roadkill, Fish and Game, secondhand sources such as fellow artists and estate sales, or are antique. In this way, I'm ensuring that no animals were needlessly killed for the sake of the artwork I produce. I fully believe that no part of any creature should go to waste if a purpose can be found for it, but I do NOT support trophy hunters or overseas fur farms by buying 'byproducts' like bones, skulls, or claws directly from them. The only exception I make for this rule is for parts from animals legally culled for population control programs approved by Fish and Wildlife.
As a photographer and wildlife enthusiast, I've been involved with many fantastic organizations such as Images4Life and Wild Tiger, as well as the Sierra Club and many smaller, local groups.
I've been published, interviewed, and even featured on Rainn Wilson (Dwight from “The Office”)'s personal networking website, SoulPancake.com.
I’ve also been blessed with the opportunity to visit many of the world’s most amazing wild places, like Komodo Island, Bali, Lombok, Malaysia, and the Cayman Islands, and have even documented entirely new species previously unknown to science.
Other interests include: Wilderness survival, primitive skills, backpacking, fishing, kayaking, boffing, airsoft, snowboarding, meandering around town, and caving.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I came up with a great idea this morning
Reblog this if you are a synesthete. That way we can all find each other!!!
Random Synesthesia Number Thing…
I hate the number 333. It hurts to even type it. It makes me feel almost physically sick. And I don’t even know why. The color of the number isn’t anything unsightly (just a VERY intense deep green color), nor is the personality of green particularly offensive. It’ just something about that number that’s so….GRRR.
Anyone else have weird synesthetic experiences like this?
This band is the only reason I survived life in the Cayman Islands.
In other news, Greg Gaffin’s voice is the only voice I’ve seen in my head as metallic gold.
I just got the first handful of letters from Brown Bear…
It’s killing me. My heart felt like it was being torn apart as I read about how they’re trying to de-civilize him. They’re breaking him down so they can build him up to be a soldier, and I hate every moment of it. Brown Bear is a brilliant man and embodies all the gentle and caring aspects of his Totem - he has it in him to be a warrior, but only when it’s called for, and certainly not for the purpose of working someone else’s agenda.
The pain it causes me is so intense that it has a color in my head - a perception normally reserved for only the most intense physical agony. It’s a crystal-like bright green with shards of red-orange around the outside, slicing inward at jagged angles.
I feel the sudden need to protect him. As if he’s been captured by the enemy in war, and is being held prisoner, while I’m unable to do anything to rescue him. I’ve never felt to hopeless in all my life, and no combination of junk food, marijuana, and old Disney cartoons will make me feel any better.
Had I the means, I’d be spending the night in the woods. But I’m city-locked, and it’s raining so hard outside that they’ve actually put out flood warnings - something I didn’t even think was possible in Oregon.
Finally, I’ve found an internal pain greater than that caused by Grizz’s abandonment after the car crash. It sounds depressing, but the bright side of this is knowing, finally, that there is an emotion with greater control over my mind than hate - and it is borne of my love for Brown Bear.
Infants Possess Intermingled Senses
What if every visit to the museum was the equivalent of spending time at the philharmonic? For painter Wassily Kandinsky, that was the experience of painting: colors triggered sounds. Now a study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that we are all born synesthetes like Kandinsky, with senses so joined that stimulating one reliably stimulates another.
The work, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, has become the first experimental confirmation of the infant-synesthesia hypothesis—which has existed, unproved, for almost 20 years.
Researchers presented infants and adults with images of repeating shapes (either circles or triangles) on a split-color background: one side was red or blue, and the other side was yellow or green. If the infants had shape-color associations, the scientists hypothesized, the shapes would affect their color preferences. For instance, some infants might look significantly longer at a green background with circles than at the same green background with triangles. Absent synesthesia, no such difference would be visible.
The study confirmed this hunch. Infants who were two and three months old showed significant shape-color associations. By eight months the preference was no longer pronounced, and in adults it was gone altogether.
The more important implications of this work may lie beyond synesthesia, says lead author Katie Wagner, a psychologist at U.C.S.D. The finding provides insight into how babies learn about the world more generally. “Infants may perceive the world in a way that’s fundamentally different from adults,” Wagner says. As we age, she adds, we narrow our focus, perhaps gaining an edge in cognitive speed as the sensory symphony quiets down.
Read about this study in “Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens” by P. Duffy when I first found out that I had synesthesia. Amazing to think that EVERYONE had synesthesia at some point.
Synaesthesis: allegra0: what i want to know is why so many synesthetes perceive I...
what i want to know is why so many synesthetes perceive I and O as white and black, just like i do
(or any combination thereof - both white, etc.)
i feel like see it all the time when i look at other people’s pictures of their alphabets
what is it about those two letters? what…
I see I as black, O as white, and A as a rusty red with a slightly orange overlay to it. I also see 1 as white when it’s by itself, but when paired with another number, it turns black, also making the colors of the other numbers around it darker. 11, however, is a medium gray, as is any combination of all 1s.
Synesthesia: I see color for pain and certain kinds of pleasure. These are the colors I saw in reaction to a minor knife wound I experienced while removing teeth from a damaged roadkill bear skull. The knife slipped and went right into the pad of my thumb.
Bright red/yellow/orange was the initial penetration of the knife into my thumb. The purple, browns, and deeper reds and rusty oranges are the throbbing sensation which continued for a few days thereafter.
I found the purple color in the throbbing to be most beautiful.
I admit, I actually applied unnecessary pressure to the cut a few times in order to see it better.
