Mag Magazine

Editorials

Long form posts containing more detail, discussion, and in depth analysis

  • What is Art Nouveau?

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    Art Nouveau as a style is pretty striking. With its flowing lines and abstract shapes, it sometimes looks almost like it’s something out of science fiction. But what is it and where did it come from?

    History

    Art Nouveau began in Europe as a direct response to the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. The advent of factories and heavily populated cities created an environment that to many was crowded and oppressive. Work hours were long, industrial waste was polluting the sky and water, and people were becoming more and more separated from nature. By the 1880s some artists and architects began experimenting with a mix of old and new concepts as an answer. They looked to the romantic ethereal nature of the Pre-Raphelites of previous decades, the graphic styles of the newly accessible Japan, and the new possibilities of modern materials. The main goal was to bring nature indoors, to reintroduce the beauty of natural concepts to an increasingly manufactured world, using inexpensive materials such as paper, concrete, iron, and glass.

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  • A Trial of Dragons and Roses

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    I recently rediscovered the joys of reading. Like many gifted and talented undiagnosed neurodivergent kids in the 90s and Naughties, fantasy worlds were my haven from a world that didn’t understand me. I burned through books faster than a furnace set to 451 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly clearing out my local library’s JFIC and YA sections between the ages of 11 and 15. And then as the story goes, college extinguished that one unadulterated joy. The responsibilities of adulthood coupled with coming out as queer in the conservative southern United States left me too exhausted to do much of anything outside of work and surviving. Then the pandemic hit and with the extra time I got a tiny taste of getting lost in a book again. It was Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith, my favorite book as a teen and still one of my favorites today, but it still wasn’t quite enough to break through that wall that had been cultivated over the previous eight years. But then this summer I swallowed my physical book purist pride and got a Kobo e-reader. The wall was destroyed and the furnace rekindled. I reread Crown Duel to get me back into the swing of things, then demolished A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing in short order. While neither of those were the most wonderful series ever, I was inspired to add a bit more whimsy to my art.

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  • Laika

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    In total the Soviet Union sent seventy-one dogs up to space during the thirty years of 1957 and 1987, in a frantic race with the United States to establish their superiority in space technology. Though public interest began in 1951, it wasn’t until six years later that the Soviets won their first victory, on October 4th of 1957 when they successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite. Buoyed by the success, Premier Nikita Krushchev wanted something even more spectacular only a month later, to celebrate the 40 year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7th.

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  • The Tower

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    This piece originally came from an attempt at getting over art block. I’ve found rain frogs just completely cure it and can get me into a new creative groove. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I’ll never be able to top this piece. It is my magnum opus, my pièce de résistance.
    I call it The Tower, partially because it’s literally a tower of three rain frogs stacked on top of each other, and partially as a nod to the tarot card. In tarot, The Tower is one of the scariest cards that can be drawn in a reading, as it symbolizing a time of sudden, potentially violent upheaval and dramatic transformation, whether it’s welcome of not. The original card is also sometimes called “the lightning struck tower,” and it features an ominous tower being struck by lightning as it reaches towards the heavens like the Tower of Babel. The card often features people, usually the figures of a man and a woman, falling to the ground, apparently having jumped from the windows that are now aflame.

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  • Medusa

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    The inspiration from this piece comes from the life cycle of jellyfish. They go from egg, to larva, to polyp, ephyra, to the adult medusa phase. After learning this, I had one thing in my mind, to depict the Greek mythological snake woman as jellyfish instead.
    There are numerous version of the story of Medusa, the earliest depicting her simply as a hideous monster that is so ugly any who look at her is turned to stone. The demigod Perseus slays her with the help of the gods and uses her severed head as a weapon, turning enemies to stone. As time progressed, her story morphs into one significantly more human and sympathetic. She becomes a beautiful human priestess of Athena, sworn to purity and celibacy. She then sleeps with Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and is turned into a monster by the goddess in revenge for defiling her temple and breaking her vows. In more modern interpretations and understandings of consent, the narrative changes to Poseidon forcing himself on her, making her a modern feminist symbol.

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  • Incitatus

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    When most people hear the name they think of the ruler of Ancient Rome renowned for his cruelty and so insane he appointed his favorite horse to the senate. While this might not be inaccurate, more recently historians have been questioning some of the claims. The majority of these accounts were written well after his death and may have been an attempt to slander the previous ruler to give more credibility to those that came after him.
    Caligula was born in 12 CE to the great general Germanicus and August Ceasar’s granddaughter Agrippina the Elder of the first ruling family in Rome. His full name was Gaius Ceasar Augustus Germanicus, but gained the nickname Caligula, meaning “little boot” or “little sandal” from his father’s soldiers. After political intrigue and ambition lead to the death of nearly every family member, Caligula succeeded his uncle Tiberius and became emperor, though he only ruled for 4 years before being assassinated by his own guard in a conspiracy to restore the Roman Republic, though instead Caligula’s uncle Claudius became emperor.

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  • Cher Ami

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    Near the end of the first World War, in November of 1917 the U.S. Army Corps’ Pigeon Service was founded. Of the six hundred English bred birds donated to the service was one named Cher Ami, meaning “dear friend” in French.
    In October of 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, he along with 59 other pigeons assigned to the the 77th Infantry Division, were the desperate last attempt to communicate that the battalion was under friendly fire. After the deaths of human messengers, and also multiple birds, Cher Ami was sent with the message:

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  • Pre-Code

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    In 1878 there was a debate on whether a horse galloped with all four hooves off the ground. The photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced The Horse In Motion, a series of photos taken in sequence of a horse galloping, proving that centuries of art depicting horses with outstretched legs, none touching the ground, were inaccurate. A horse does have a moment when no hooves are on the ground, but it’s when the hooves are underneath them, not outstretched.
    As a brand new technology and art form, early film was incredibly experimental and the competition to create the biggest, most box office worthy movie was fierce.

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  • Felicia

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    On May 18th of 1972, about 40 miles outside of Chicago, The Village Crier published an obituary for a ferret. Her name was Felicia, and the paper even included a photograph, her little head and paws emerging from a tube. She’s largely forgotten today, but in 1971 she was a solution to a problem in the construction of the particle accelerator they were developing at Fermilab. The researchers were encountering many issues, one of which was metal shavings and other potential obstructions in the vacuum tubes blocking the particles they were trying to accelerate. A British researcher by the name of Robert Sheldon proposed the idea of sending a ferret through the nearly 4 miles of pipe, as it was cheaper and more readily available than constructing a robot. Enter Felicia, a very small 13 inch ferret ordered specifically for the task. With the prospect of a comfy cage and hamburger meat, she would run 300 foot sections of the tubes, some being only 3×4 inches in size, barely larger than her head. A line was tied to a harness made for her, and after she ran the tube someone would tie a swab to the other end and pull it through. She quickly became a mascot and favorite of the researchers, and when “she became bored” of her task and her robot replacement was completed, she retired to a simple life of a pet.

    My goal with this piece was to give Felicia the celebrity status she deserves. Like how Alphonse Mucha made posters for Sarah Bernhardt in the late 1800s, I made a poster for her in a similar style. The orange circle is the track Felicia ran, the flowers are violets which are the state flower of Illinois, and the color palette was inspired by a recent photograph of a modern particle accelerator.

    Prints available

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