Recommended Museums

The ideal museum would be a comprehensive collection of dioramas, art, antiquities, natural history items, anthropological artifacts, medical preparations, mechanical wonders, and curiosities of all kinds, including items of questionable authenticity. These would all be piled floor to ceiling, room after room, wonder upon wonder. A new annotated museum guide has been added to the Zymoglyphic Museum Web site. It lists museums and similar institutions in Europe and on the American coasts where elements of this ideal museum may be found. Shown here is the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England.

Readers are welcome to nominate other institutions for inclusion on this list.

-- The Museum Staff

Museum Shop - 2005 Financial Report

The 2005 sales figures for the museum shop have been tallied. The actual value is a closely guarded secret; however, we can say that it is in the low two digits. The actual number of items sold could reportedly be counted, with little effort, on the fingers on one hand. The bonus for purchasers of museum merchandise is that any items that are purchased are likely to become collector's items due to their extreme rarity (this according to the marketing department). However, we can report that positive steps are being taken. New items have been added to the roster of merchandise. In 2005, we hired a winsome spokesmodel, Ileana, shown here reacting to the financial news. At the shop, she turns on the charm to show museum patrons just how fashionable our merchandise can be. Customers may rest assured that if she is wearing it, it is indeed in the best of taste.

-- The Museum Staff

Painting

In creating assemblage works from natural objects, I often think of having a sort of partnership, where I provide the overall idea and "let nature do the detail work". Natural objects often have a complex texture to them that remains interesting even at very close range. I started thinking that I could do some painting to make underwater diorama backgrounds - ideally the sort of atmosphere evoked by the paintings of Yves Tanguy (such as the one shown here). I took some classes on the basics of acrylic painting from Tesia Blackburn. I made some tiny paintings with interesting textures and became fascinated with making amoebas out of tar gel. The results are showcased in the Shoebox Art Gallery #3.

Last fall, I took a class at the Pacific Art League with Nancy Rice who makes large abstract paintings using a sort of pour-and-shake technique. I discovered that if I did something similar on Masonite board, the pigment deposit made an amazingly detailed pattern, consistent with my "let nature do the detail work" plan. I decided that some of the resulting paintings were interesting enough to be displayed on their own, and that the collaboration with natural processes qualified them as the Zymoglyphic art of the new millenium.

The story of how the museum came to be

The museum's curator has been kind enough to submit a personal history of the Zymoglyphic Museum from its humble beginnings as a 10 year old's natural history museum and zoo to the vibrant melange that you see today. The catalog of holdings from that first museum still survives today, and a page from it is shown here.

-- The Museum Staff

Museum article in Matrix magazine

The museum is pleased to announce its first foray into the print world! Issue #72 of Matrix (Fall 2005) has just been published with a three-page article on the museum, as part of the "New Victorians" theme of the issue. The article includes eight color photographs of objects from the collections, with explanatory text. Matrix is a longtime Canadian literary and art magazine published in Montreal.

The text of the article was submitted by the museum at the magazine editor's request. It is an abbreviated version of an ongoing museum project, a printed guide to the museum and its collections.

-- The Museum Staff