 Hi everyone, it's MJ the Fellow Actuary and in this video I want to talk about my art. So I've been exhibiting since 2016 and I've been at a different gallery every single year doing an exhibition and now in 2020 I have moved to Super Rare which is digital art on the blockchain and you can actually go to their website and place a bit on this piece but what I want to do in this video is just maybe talk a little bit more about this piece that we have over here. So let's just jump straight into it. So first of all you're probably wondering what is that background that keeps going red? Well those are the tectonic plates of earth and the red is to actually symbolize the fact that you know there's lava under the earth. We've then got this really cool map made by one of my favorite academics called Cholesander's Purse and I don't even know how to pronounce this. It's a quintessential projection but it's a way to do the map of the earth without distorting any of the land masses. Of course the only awkward thing about this map is that New Zealand gets chopped up into the top four corners but what's nice about it is that Africa my continent isn't shrunk like on normal maps. Then I've got this little thing which is like a mermaid flying a stingray. It's from the Garden of Earthly Delights a very famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch. I hope I am pronouncing that Dutch artist's name correctly and I'm really am inspired by a lot of the work that he does. Speaking about artists this is Abraham and Isaac. This is a big religious scene from an artist called William Blake who again I really get a lot of my inspiration from. Then seeing that I'm based in Cape Town I've got a few of the some of the famous boats that visited Cape Town back in the day. So we've got the St Gabriel which Vasco de Gama from Portugal sailed to Cape Town with and then we have the Dramadyrus which Jan van Riebeck from the Netherlands came down to Cape Town with. So yeah took quite a bit of time drawing these boats and then they've got very small little parts in this piece but yeah I'm all about the detail. Then yeah I mean the fact that I'm from Cape Town well I'm living in Cape Town now originally from Johannesburg which is based here in South Africa and that is kind of the view from my parents place where I was kind of like thinking of this art piece. So you'll see us in the bottom corner all the bottom there I'm just kind of showing you where the inspiration or where this piece was conceived in the world. Then I was looking through Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks for for inspiration and I came across this unknown drawing which I just thought was cool. I have no idea what it is but I was like you know what it has to go into the piece. Then this is a very famous ancient Greek computer. Again my pronunciation is a little bit dodgy but we're going to try the Antikathira mechanism and it's a little bit of an enigma when it comes to science because why did the ancient Greeks have like this fancy technology back in the day. So we'll see we've used this as a pattern just to create a little bit of layers in the piece. Then like I said I started this piece actually back in 2016. I remember starting it before Pokemon Go and that's why I didn't want to release it straight away because then Pokemon came back with quite a bit of vengeance and the piece was supposed to have a little bit of nostalgia so I've waited a little bit longer and done a few more additions to the piece and now only releasing it in 2020. The problem with that though is I got these scientific waves from a really really old source and I have forgotten where it comes from. I did a Google reverse image search on this and I think my sketching of the waves is a little bit too bad because yeah they couldn't they couldn't pick up where this is from. It could have been from one of Isaac Newton's books like I said it was this is four years ago. This was really cool. Again my pronunciation is going to let me down but this is a dwarf planet that is in our solar system. It's flying around Neptune it's got an egg shape and it's got this weird rotating frame orbit which I've kind of represented in the in the egg shape planet. It's named after like I said the Hawaiian goddess so we've got the Hawaiian islands there but I just thought it's really cool. I mean this is a dwarf planet in our solar system that I didn't know about and I was like wow um and I guess maybe it's one of the things we want to talk about in this piece is you know we're so focused on Pokemon and pop culture that we sometimes don't spend enough time learning about yeah our own our own solar system and all the crazy stuff that's happening around us. Anyway moving on another artist that really influenced me is Joseph Kapik. This is his piece Melinda Zena. I really do need to work on my pronunciation. Again very very small piece a little you know detail in this piece but really am influenced by his style. You should check out the original of this piece it's you know I haven't done it justice by just you know tracing out the outline it really really is a stunning piece. Then we've got those two heads the Julia Caesar and Herodotus. I think we all know Julia Caesar as the Roman leader and then Herodotus is a Greek historian which is maybe a little bit of an unknown guy but he's just got such a cool face. Then this big piece at the bottom is a Viking compass. I just love that pattern and those sharp angles it is it is really a nice design. Then there's a lot more computers in this. You can see this is the Charles Babbage machine. Babbage is that how you pronounce it I don't know. Very much an early computer we having a top down look of this thing. Again it just it fascinated me this the whole pattern that this thing kind of created and then of course let's talk about you know who's that Pokemon. It's not actually a Pokemon instead it is a North mythology devil that I found while Google searching ruins in the Viking Scandinavian area and I just thought it's so cool how yeah I think most of us have never seen this thing before yet we've all yeah we all know Pokemon and I thought I don't know Pokemon they keep releasing new Pokemon so this could become a Pokemon. Probably it will be a ghost type or a dark type Pokemon but yeah I just wanted to have that question of you know who's that Pokemon people think hey you know have I seen that before and I don't know it's maybe it's a call for education that's what I like to do on my YouTube channel is I do like to teach and I think that's coming across in the arts as well is to try and get a little bit of that curiosity get people interested in North mythology because I don't know it's very rich there's a lot a lot of joy to be had from it and then yeah I mean people like to always ask me what exactly is the meaning of the piece I've given a few clues to it now but of course I mean what would an art piece of me be if it didn't have some sort of secret cryptic code so there's a little bit of a clue it's in the piece try and decipher that and that'll of course give you a little bit of an answer to the meaning of this piece. Anyway that's I don't want to take too much of your time so once again my name is Michael Jordan based here in Cape Town you're probably coming from the link from Super Rare but if you're not if you're watching this on YouTube then see the link in the description to go to Super Rare where you can see this piece on the blockchain and you can actually make a bid to purchase it and yeah who knows this might be a really good investment for you. Anyway thanks so much for watching and I will see you guys soon. Cheers!