Laitue de chien

Despite being a delicious and incredibly useful plant, the Common Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) is despised by many gardeners.  The degree to which the lawn care industry has demonized this plant is quite extraordinary, and has resulted in an unjustly negative attitude towards this beautiful plant. In this drawing, I explore the Dandelion’s aesthetic form, and its relationship with another suburban creature: one who loves this plant undogmatically—the pooch.

Pastel and permanent marker.

Dead Trees

Throughout my time at Fleming college, I have contributed several articles to an independent magazine distributed at the campus. All of the articles are written by students for students. Ontop of contributed botanically inquisitive articles and poetry, I decided to leave a lasting impression on the very last issue to be published by designing a new logo for the cover.

Below is a link to the article that I wrote in the magazine. Since this is art-time and not story-time, I will leave it at your discretion if you would enjoy reading it. It is entitled Outside the Hops and explores the hops plant and it’s relationship with people, examining it’s significance as a medicinal herb, it’s taxonomy and it’s importance within the history of brewing. Page 1 Page 2

Persea americana

This tasty art was produced during the first Art Jam of the 2012 semester at Fleming College. I really like how the skin and the seed in the center turned out. The flesh is a little too vibrant, but I used what I had to work with. Click for hi-res!

Tending the Tree of Life

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” –Charles Darwin


Darwin sees evolution as a non-hierarchical explosion of multi-directional changes and adaptations. I tried to capture the essence of the great man, tending to his idea over the multiple decades he spent developing his theory. The artwork is based on (and incorporates) Darwin’s sketch of his proposed Tree of Life, which in a lot of ways continues to be much more accurate than the forward-facing, teleological depictions of evolution we see today. Darwin’s figure was developed by manipulating various images (a bust of Darwin, a suit, a pair of shoes and a watering can), and the tree (along with its foliage) was drawn on the computer. The top of the tree, wherein speciation is shown, is Darwin’s original image, as are the words “I think,” which I believe, in their scribbled-down context, to be the two most modest words ever written.

Accompanying this image is an essay I recently wrote for my History of Evolution course, which provided inspiration for the direction in which I decided to take this artwork.

Hope to hear your thoughts,

–Ionatan Waisgluss

Humulus Lupulus

Rob Nagy’s extremely late birthday present. He certainly drinks a lot of it.


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