Ben's Visions

This is my index page for visual art of all kinds — drawings, collages, animation, sculpture, whatever. Visual art is an occasional hobby for me, but it's one I enjoy a lot, and I've dabbled in a wide variety of media.

As I add more content to this section, I'll add more levels of organization to this index, but a simple list will do for now. Click on the thumbnail to see the full-sized image. Enjoy!


New 4/21/2005: When is a Hindu form of devotional chanting Jewish? When it's in Hebrew. And when is OM Jewish? When it spells "shalOM", of course! Two great religions. Two obscure writing systems. One universal truth — and a nifty bit of calligraphy.

New 2/18/2005: It's a guitar! It's a Nintendo Entertainment System controller! It's... both? This image will appear on flyers for concerts of my video game songs. I'd love to see it used on OC ReMix, too.

Noam Chomsky offered "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as an example of a grammatical but meaningless sentence. Who says it's meaningless?

Yet another curious juxtaposition of Hebrew liturgy with some other concept. This time, the lettering is mine, but the idea is properly due to filker Bob Kanefsky, according to whom God wrote in LISP. It's the first three days of Creation, formatted as a LISP parse tree.

I have a certain knack for seeing juxtapositions and then realizing them. Here we see the Internet's two favorite grey-and-white rabbits 1 2, their extraordinary abilities pitted against each other for the first time. Who will triumph?

This is a frame from the film Mononoke Hime ("Princess Mononoke") by Hayao Miyazaki, to which I've added a caption taken from the Siddur (the Hebrew prayerbook). It reads: "Ruler of life and death, who makes salvation sprout." If you've seen Mononoke Hime, it makes perfect sense. The lettering is in SPTiberian, a public-domain Hebrew font.

In the interests of resuming drawing as a regular habit, I bought myself a big box of 3"x5" index cards. They have a pretty good surface for pen and pencil (I usually work in mechanical pencil and then ink with a black rollerball), and they're small enough that it's easy to set up a composition. This is the first of this series — an inhabited planet seen from orbit.

Here it is as it was meant to be seen — inverted. Note the city lights on the dark side of the moon.

This index card drawing shows an imaginary nautilus-like creature.

This index card drawing shows schematic views of a F.E.I.N.T. — that's "Fan-Engine Interceptor Night-Talon." I came up with a lot of other silly acronyms that night, too. Since it doesn't have any obvious control surfaces, those twin turbofans probably have vectored nozzles — either that, or it can only fly in a straight line.

This index card drawing shows the sun setting behind rolling hills as an Undstdna (about which more information in Worlds, eventually) watches from under a tree. I sketched this one directly in ink.


This page created and maintained by Benjamin Newman