Fantasy & Nature Gallery

I spent many happy days in the jungle in Ecuador with our Quechua guide. The flowers and plants were the most amazing I had ever seen. It was truly a magical place.

The squirrel in the foreground was used on a card for my mother when she was in the hospital. She said, “It could be better.” I redid the squirrel, and it was better. My client at the time said, “Mother knows best.”

Life in a desert is rich and abundant. This image calls to mind Carlos Castaneda’s books about Don Juan, the Yaqui mystic. In the desert, even the wind is alive.

The colorful grassland environment is a joyous place filled with all kinds of activity.

A pond rife with life.

This is one of 90 illustrations from a book the artist illustrated for Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in Brooklyn, New York, entitled, Gardening with Children.

This is one of 90 illustrations from a book the artist illustrated for Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in Brooklyn, New York, entitled, Gardening with Children.

During my time in Tokyo, I witnessed the higgledy-piggledy chaos of Tokyo construction, architecture, and the subway transit system, all from a train’s-eye view.

Witnessing the urban chaos of my first year living in New York City. Madness and mayhem in the East Village!

Walking this bridge at the end of the orkday helped me clear my mind and adjust to life in New York City after my move from Tokyo.

Seen in a pizza joint a block from where I lived on Avenue A in the East Village of New York City: an anchovy story!

I created this rubbing for a class assignment at the first of three art & design schools I attended in the California Bay Area. Can you spot the Transamerica Building?

A New York Times assignment for the Sunday Magazine Hers column. A woman finally found her way out of substance abuse when she realized she had been caring very poorly for her cat named “Blue.” According to the story, at one point, she threw raw bacon in his dish.

Microbes multiply so rapidly, that in only ten hours, one bacterium can yield billions of bacteria. Of course, it helps to have a glass of champagne, a rose, and a fez nearby! Especially after attending a production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met!

Deinococcus Radiodurans, which means “strange or terrible berry that withstands radiation,” was discovered in 1956 during experiments in sterilizing packaged food using radiation instead of heat.

The microbes simply refused to die. Dubbed “Conan the Bacterium”, the microbes can withstand 3,000 times the radiation that would kill a human being! D. Radiodurans is believed to be some two billion years old. It may well be one of the earliest forms of life on “our” planet.

In the 1920s, scientists collected bacteria from oil deposits in sedimentary rocks 600 meters below ground. These organisms evolved from microbes buried 340 million years ago when the sedimentary rocks were formed, and dinosaurs walked the earth above. These heat-loving bacteria, or “thermophiles,” thrive at an ambient temperature of 167 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hydrothermal vents are chimney-like structures on the ocean floor. They form when hot (350 degree Centigrade) mineral-rich water flows out onto the ocean floor through volcanic lava. The metals and gases give the water a smoky, blackish appearance. These hydrothermal vents support vast ecosystems, the only communities on Earth whose energy source is not sunlight. The organisms include tubeworms, octopi, zoarcid fish, clams, shrimp, crabs, etc. Because they thrive in heat, they are called “thermophiles.”

Halophiles, or “salt-lovers,” can thrive in extremely salty water that would be fatal to other life forms, due to their resistance to the dehydrating effects of salt. The Dead Sea is the saltiest and lowest body of water on earth at 400 feet below sea level. The halophilic microorganisms give the Dead Sea its distinctly purple color.

Some anaerobic bacteria contain strands of magnetic lodestone crystals, which orient the bacteria in the direction of earth’s magnetic fields and, at the same time, pull the microbes downward, keeping them in an oxygen-free environment at the bottom of mud puddles. This phenomenon is called “magnetotaxis.”

According to the theory of panspermia, life on Earth was seeded from space by microbes hitch-hiking to Earth on comets and asteroids like the ALH84001 meteor from Mars.

Organisms have been found in the highest freshwater lake in the world, in the caldera of dormant Licancabur Volcano in Chile. In spite of low oxygen, high ultra-violet radiation, and low atmospheric pressure, these anaerobes thrive in one of the most Mars-like places on earth.

Microbes in the rumen of cattle feed on forages ingested by cattle. They are called “methanogens” because they produce methane gas through fermentation.

Her name is Mathilde, “The Medieval Microbe.”