Mondolithic Studios

Archanica has just been finished. The canvas is approx. 60 cm high by 41 cm wide. You can scroll down a few posts to see the piece as it was in progress.

We have also been working with Wendy S. Delmater on the cover art for ‘Abyss + Apex’ – a sci-fi and fantasy anthology being published by Hadley Rille Books. This book will feature award-nominated and honorable mentioned stories. The premliminary artwork will be featured at Worldcon in Denver. We are not sure if we will have the oil painting completed by then, but the digital sketches will be circulating with the goal of having the book ready for purchase at World Fantasy in Calgary, Canada.

We will also have two canvas’ featured at the TTA Press desk (Interzone Magazine – Black Static Magazine). The two paintings in question will be ‘Softly Shining’ and ‘Metal Dragon Year’ and will be available for sale.

The illustration featured here is a second unpublished digital sketch from an assignment for an article on the problems facing China (and the rest of the world) regarding the rapid, mass industrializion of the nation, and the resulting problems – industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children and adults killed or sickened by lead poisoning and other types of local pollution; and a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.

The New York Times writes ‘The speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Zip over to the above link to check out the rest of the article written by JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY.

“I was sitting in the porch of the house at the trading station of Vanovara at breakfast time … when suddenly in the north … the sky was split in two and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared to be covered with fire. At that moment I felt great heat as if my shirt had caught fire; this heat came from the north side. I wanted to pull off my shirt and throw it away, but at that moment there was a bang in the sky, and a mighty crash was heard. I was thrown to the ground about three sajenes [about 7 meters] away from the porch and for a moment I lost consciousness… The crash was followed by noise like stones falling from the sky, or guns firing. The earth trembled, and when I lay on the ground I covered my head because I was afraid that stones might hit it.” – S.B. Semenov, an eyewitness in the village of Vanovara about 60 km south of the explosion site

This illustration, for a cover story on the Tunguska Impact Event – was commissioned by Le Scienze Magazine in Italy.

For more info on this story – check out some of these links…

University of Bologna – Academic site for research into the Tunguska phenomenon.

Another Russian site, this one including materials from the 90th-anniversary conference held in Krasnoyarsk, June 30-July 6, 1998.

The megalink Tunguska page — all Tunguska, all the time.

James Oberg’s critique of Tunguska UFOlogy.

Andrei Ol’khovatov’s geophysical interpretation of the Tunguska Event.

“Take the high ground and hold it!” has been standard combat doctrine for armies since ancient times. Now that people and their machines have entered outer space, it is no surprise that generals the world over regard Earth orbit as the key to modern warfare. But until recently, a norm had developed against the weaponization of space—even though there are no international treaties or laws explicitly prohibiting nonnuclear anti­satellite systems or weapons placed in orbit. Nations mostly shunned such weapons, fearing the possibility of destabilizing the global balance of power with a costly arms race in space.

In war, do not launch an ascending attack head-on against the enemy who holds the high ground. Do not engage the enemy when he makes a descending attack from high ground. Lure him to level ground to do battle.
—Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategist, The Art of War, circa 500 B.C.

That consensus is now in danger of unraveling. In October 2006 the Bush administration adopted a new, rather vaguely worded National Space Policy that asserts the right of the U.S. to conduct “space control” and rejects “new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space.” Three months later the People’s Republic of China shocked the world by shooting down one of its own aging Fengyun weather satellites, an act that resulted in a hailstorm of dangerous orbital debris and a deluge of international protests, not to mention a good deal of hand-wringing in American military and political circles. The launch was the first test of a dedicated antisatellite weapon in more than two decades—making China only the third country, after the U.S. and the Russian Federation, to have demonstrated such a technology. Many observers wondered whether the test might be the first shot in an emerging era of space warfare.

Zip on over to this link to read the rest of this article written by Theresa Hitchens for Scientific American Magazine.

Just a quick post of a work in progress.

It is an oil on canvas piece titled ‘Archanica’.