Bushwhack. One definition says “to make one’s way through woods by cutting at undergrowth, branches, etc.” This is how I ended up rolling through life.
Born into a family with an alcoholic father and a mother busy working to pay the bills and raise three children, “nurturing” was virtually non-existent in my rearing. We hear this sort of story all the time and most certainly there are people who had it much worse than I. But, this environment guided my early years and led me to seek attention and acceptance outwardly, have poor study habits in high school, low self-esteem, no long-term vision, etc. Fortunately, I soon realized the surrogate environment and bad attitude were just more dead ends and not the life I wanted. It took a while for this lost soul to find the confidence to start a journey completely alone. But I did. And that’s what matters in this story.
Some of you who attended the 2013 GNSI conference in Bar Harbor, Maine may remember Chuck Carter who gave an interesting presentation on the future of eBooks. Chuck started a new company a year ago and is now working on his first independent project. Using polar bears as the focal point, Chuck and his team are creating an interactive almanac about polar bears and the arctic ecosystem in which they live. But this book is squarely aimed at a mass market. So it has interactivity, games, and a friendly art style.
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has adorned its cover with works of medical art for 50 years. A JAMA redesign this summer put the table of contents on the front cover and moved the art inside. Apparently, readers appreciated the art but were not sure what was inside.
Mauricio Alvarez Abel, our southernmost Chilean GNSI member is the guest blogger today. He is working closely with Chilean scientists to reconstruct recent dinosaur finds in southern Chile. These discoveries shed new light on the recurring connection between South America and the Antarctic. Mauricio also has had one of his images accepted into the "Focus on Nature" and has a strong desire to come to the New York opening, but it is a long way to travel...
I asked fifteen artists to join me on Tumamoc Hill, Tucson, AZ, for a day to paint at the U of A Desert Lab. The landscape is a working lab and the public is restricted to the paved road that extends to the top of the hill, where petroglyphs and artifacts from an Anasazi community can be found. The historic stone buildings provided facilities as well as wonderful subjects to draw. This living laboratory gave us an ungroomed Sonoran Desert landscape. I would like to offer more workshops in this fascinating place.
Gray-bearded John Gurche has been in the paleo-reconstruction business for a long time. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures are featured in numerous books, magazines, and exhibitions in the National Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, National Geographic magazine, Natural History magazine, and The Guild Handbook of Natural Science Illustration (see Hodges 2003, 1989), just to name a few. He teaches and lectures about his work to public and scholarly audiences, including the GNSI.
It was a rare treat to spend four days with botanical artist Carol Woodin during the 2013 Education Workshop, “Painting Slipper Orchids in Watercolor” May 31st - June 3rd at the beautiful Reiman Gardens in Ames, Iowa. Carol is a wonderful botanical artist whose breathtakingly beautiful artwork has been exhibited and collected around the world. She has exhibited at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and has her artwork in the Shirley Sherwood collection.
Australian GNSI member Geoff Thompson's specimen photos are winning him recognition down under. Geoff works for the 
Amadeo Bachar, the digital media instructor for the Scientific Illustration Program at California State University in Monterey, provided an excellent workshop plan for us, and was an excellent and very qualified teacher, and very patient.
The Big Apples of New York takes the reader on a wonderful journey that includes apples. It teases the senses. It is filled with rich history related to the apple, from the beginning with Adam and Eve to the people who brought the seeds to America. The book contains myths, medical uses, history, and a wonderful mystery.