“I’ve always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters’ irritation was perfectly reasonable. Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion, so it was no wonder to me Godzilla was crabby; as for King Kong, few men would blame him for his attraction to pretty Fay Wray. (Though her screaming would have eventually put off anyone less patient than a gorilla.) If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.” Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
I have a special love for the octopus, those little blobs with brains in their arms, taste in their skin, and a beak in their belly. People are always surprised to find that everyday things have big intelligence, and the octopus are one of those things. They have the highest brain to body mass ratios of all invertebrates, and even greater than some vertebrates. They learn nothing from their parents, males die soon after mating and females die soon after their guarded eggs hatch out. Their intelligence is older than words, it it in their core being and genes.
What magic it is to be able to change colors and texture to match a background, and even imitate other dangerous predators like the lion fish. They are problem solvers, and know how to move around in plain sight of predators by pretending to be a rock, or grabbing shells for protection.
This little painting was truly a 24 hour venture, as it has a little glazing on it to give the colors some depth and saturation. I feel like I may want to revisit this as a larger composition in the future, that’s how much I love octopuses!
Let’s get Kraken
“I’ve always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters’ irritation was perfectly reasonable. Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion, so it was no wonder to me Godzilla was crabby; as for King Kong, few men would blame him for his attraction to pretty Fay Wray. (Though her screaming would have eventually put off anyone less patient than a gorilla.) If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.”
Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
I have a special love for the octopus, those little blobs with brains in their arms, taste in their skin, and a beak in their belly. People are always surprised to find that everyday things have big intelligence, and the octopus are one of those things. They have the highest brain to body mass ratios of all invertebrates, and even greater than some vertebrates. They learn nothing from their parents, males die soon after mating and females die soon after their guarded eggs hatch out. Their intelligence is older than words, it it in their core being and genes.
What magic it is to be able to change colors and texture to match a background, and even imitate other dangerous predators like the lion fish. They are problem solvers, and know how to move around in plain sight of predators by pretending to be a rock, or grabbing shells for protection.
This little painting was truly a 24 hour venture, as it has a little glazing on it to give the colors some depth and saturation. I feel like I may want to revisit this as a larger composition in the future, that’s how much I love octopuses!