Fiddling about on a Monday night

So I was fiddling about with the new painting last night, and added a few little touches here and there:


I know, I know, you can hardly tell at this resolution. You'll have to believe me.

o o o

While I was drawing the images which served as the basis for this painting, I was thinking about Swine Flu and weird undiscovered microbes and fungal spores and so on. When I was painting it the other night, though, I started remembering how when I was a kid I read some WWII war story or something which involved the torrid, insidious dangers of floating mines. I could clearly remember what I had imagined at the time that they looked like -- and that was something remarkably similar to my 'cluster' of 'microbes'. Of course, the real thing is more functional and less fantastic, but there you go.

What happened then was that S. and I, performing a Google image search for floating mines, came across (as the #1 result) a perfectly wonderful and bizarre webpage which had very little actually to do with naval armaments, a lot to do with the possible origins, dating and content of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, and was also far too heavy to process at the time (we were quite drunk).

Here's the opening paragraph, just to get you started:

This page describes my theory about the possible origins, dating and content of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. This theory proposes that the Voynich Manuscript may be a faux book, which was created between 1610 and 1620, and made to look as though it came from Francis Bacon's fictional island of New Atlantis. And as such, that it was made to look much older than it was, and that it includes a map of the fictional Bensalem, along with both real and fanciful representations of optics and other devices, flora and fauna, the Arts and sciences, astronomy and astrology. And, that much of this was reflected from past, real works, but distorted into an imaginative reflection of how the author thought they would have been perceived and practiced by the advanced, fictional culture of New Atlantis. The theory further supposes that it may have been created under the influence of, and possibly created by someone from, the circle of Francis Bacon's near contemporaries and their world. These include Cornelis Drebbel, Michael Maier, Solomon De Caus, Johann Valentin Andreae, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Simon Forman, Robert Fludd, among others.