Fi Webster's photos with the keyword: shark

Cut-paper collage postcard 8 1/2" x 9 1/2" The notion that not just humans, but other animals on the planet, leave ephemera in their wake is fascinating to me. So to celebrate one of the more spectacular examples of Nature's ephemera, I photographed a fossil tooth I have of C. megalodon , the largest shark that ever lived, considered by most taxonomists to be an ancestor of today's great white shark, C. carcharias . Why does a shark tooth count as ephemera? Because shark teeth grow in what's referred to as a "conveyer belt," each tooth that gets shed being quickly replaced by a newer, sharper one that rolls forward into place. As for the big shark that shed this tooth, here is a a useful diagram . The red and grey sharks are the conservative and maximum estimates of Megalodon's size, the maximum being 20 meters (67 feet). (!) The violet shark is a whale shark, the largest shark extant today. The green shark is a great white, and there's a black human figure for scale. My own Megalodon tooth is not all that large: just 4 3/4" (12.1 cm) tall. They can be as tall as 7 1/2" (19.1 cm). I purposely photographed my tooth with some shadow showing, to give you a sense of what it's like in 3-D. Rest of the collage: Background from an old map of southern India. Ephemera include advertisements, greeting cards, fortune-telling cards, Loteria cards, pharmacy labels, ration tickets, other tickets, and cancelled postage stamps. Artistamps & their cancellations: bananas by Anna Banana, bunny-cum-airplane by the fabulous C. T. Chew.

Cut-paper collage w/ acrylic paint 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" That's a famous photo of icthyologists posing in the reconstructed jaws of the giant prehistoric shark, Megalodon. I don't know when the photo was taken, but as you can tell from the clothes, a long time ago. The title was inspired by the fact that those reconstructed jaws no longer exist. They were found to be inaccurately large: we now think the maw of Megalodon was more like four feet. Time eats everything, eventually.

Big square collage postcard for Mandy. Glass paperweight heart clipped from the Artful Home catalog. Fish are all scanned from John M. Carrera's Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities (highly recommended: I got it from Chronicle Books ). As for the clipping, the Weekly World News reported: Bashful bachelor gal Andrea Lyons longed to say "I do" and settle down, but every guy she took a liking to left her high and dry--so dingbat Andrea married a man-eating shark. As 40 flabbergasted guests looked on, the elated lady tied the knot with her pet shark Archie in a seaside ceremony at her home in Sydney, Australia. "Everyone says Archie is dangerous and that some day he's going to eat me alive, but compared to the guys I've met lately, he's an absolute angel," the blushing bride gushed to reporters. "He's gentle and he kisses nice and he doesn't leave his dirty underwear lying all over my house. As far as I'm concerned he's a helluva catch." ...and so on. =laugh= The caption for the photo reads "Happy bride Andrea Lyons gives her new hubby a big wet kiss." Oh, and by the way, I had the fish neatly lined up so you could read "LOVE is all you need" on each of the four sides, but you know fish...they will swim to the beat of their own breakers...by the time I put the card down on the scanner, they were all mixed up. =shrug=

I've always thought people take Ariel's song (from The Tempest ) a little too seriously. That's why I went with a whimsical approach. I encourage you to read the lines aloud. Cut-paper collage created for the Kollage Kit weekly theme: "Shakespeare." The image of the father is a detail from a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan. Props to A. J. Tallman for telling me about Blue Hills Studio stencils.

My previous Mae West collage is the most popular image in my Flickr stream, by a huge margin. So I thought I'd make another one. The medium is cut-paper collage postcard. Mae West is in the dress bedecked with ermine tails that she wore in the movie "Klondike Annie." Her arms are replaced by those of Vin Diesel, from "xXx." The shark inside her diving helmet is a mako. For those of you who're curious about what Mae West is covering up, it's a page from my journal of nearly 30 years ago. At the time, I was doing neurophysiology research in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the following, "slice prep" refers to a complicated setup for keeping alive a slice from the brain of a rat (killed humanely, of course). Bob is my husband, Ray was the head of the lab, and Dr. Bayer was a therapist I left behind when I moved from Houston. The page reads: "I had awful nightmares last night, scenes of blood and violence. I was working to get the slice prep going, and sharks foraged in waist-deep murky water. They found the corpse of a small child who had died there, and they picked the bones clean. Ray and myself and the grad student Steve, we had to throw the bones out in the hallway before going back to work. . . My dream indicates that I am worried that my anger is eating me up, despite the surface level of insouciance. (Ray and I sitting on the counter, swinging our legs just inches above the bloody water, waiting for the frenzy to be over so we could go about our business.) Bob has observed that I haven't really thrown myself into my work, that I am resisting it, fighting it somehow. I think I am fighting the reality of this time. I don't want it to be real that I'm not Dr. Bayer's patient anymore. It's too much. It threatens to strangle me. It comes like the shark, whose initial bite is felt as a strange, thudding, pulling sensation. And then you look down, and your leg is gone, and you wait to be eaten alive. You wait for death. If I'm not with him (in him, of him), then I'm not the person I was. And therefore I'm dead. The sharks feed on my mangled corpse. The new 'me' goes on with her life." The last sentence on the page ends with "...Chapel Hill called 'This Side of Heaven.')" I don't know if this counts as an art journal page, or not...

This note goes with the aumakua ATC .

For Nightmares & Fairy Tales ATC #1: Open Medium -- explanatory note about what an aumakua is . Hand-carved shark stamp. Water stamp from Meer Image .

It puts me in such a good mood when I draw a shark: it's a wonder I ever draw anything else. This is for the "Fish-Themed Artistic Postcard" on swap-bot. I get to send it to a woman named Tatyana who lives in Samara, Russia! The species is Oceanic Whitetip aka Carcharinus longimanus ("raggedy [teeth] long hands"). I know his right pectoral fin looks like it's too long. But I was working from a photo, and I swear that's how it was.