My art and science creation is a painting done on canvas with acrylic paint. I also collaged a sheet of paper into the piece. The image is of a man emerging from a brick wall. I drew on the theories of both quantum and relativity for the scientific foundation of my concept. For the art work I was inspired by an anonymous sculpture I saw last summer in Montmartre and the work of the artist Magritte.
The skyline of my painting shows a starry night sky. However the rest of the painting is colored and shaded as though it were mid-day. The brick wall indicates this with its own coloration as well as with the blue day time sky and bright green grass which show through from behind. This is one element I drew from Magritte’s work. I also decided to leave the figure as a silhouette and fill his form with an object that did not belong there. Again I was drawing inspiration from Magritte, but rather than copy him exactly I decided to fill my form with precipitation rather than his typical clouds.
The precipitation in my figure changes midway down from rain to snow (I decided to base the order on the concept that hot air rises and cool air sinks). I did this as a nod to quantum theory. There is no in between, at zero degrees the rain changes, and is simply no longer rain. The change from one to another therefore indicates the line of zero degrees. It is a metaphoric division of the painting into an arbitrary human measurement, and its nature related application.
The brick wall has several chinks in which the world behind is visible. This and the concept of the man half emerged from within the wall were also meant to convey my understanding of quantum theory. Both indicate the perplexity I feel at the notion that we, and indeed everything we know, is made up mostly of empty space. Based on this knowledge we should be able to see and walk through walls. Yet we cannot. Even made up mostly of empty space humanity perceives the world as solid. It is an illusion of density that kept people from knowing a fundamental truth about life for many thousands of years.
The clock is the element added with glue onto the canvas. I did this because I wanted to play, in a subtle way, with the illusion of words. The clock’s background is a printed chapter of Einstein’s book; The World as I See It. This was significant because Einstein had such a unique way of seeing the world, very important in the twentieth and twenty first century, but also because the words convey meaning, and indeed can convey an image but it is all an illusion of little black letters. The only real shape the paper holds is a circle, and that being the form of a clock, is also an illusion.
The numbers on the clock are melting and falling from their proper places to indicate the way in which Einstein conquered the traditional concept of time as a constant and dependable measure of the universe with his theory of relativity.
The crack in the wall, just beside the clock, is a symbol of the crack in our former understanding of everything, a crack in the solidity that existed before Einstein and the other scientists of the early twentieth century came along and changed everything.
The two major themes of my piece are the emptiness of matter, and the unreliability of time. Einstein once said that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. This was a significant quote for my project because rain and snow cannot happen at once, neither can night and day. Though the clock is falling apart and inaccurate it is a necessary constant for humanity to use as a way of keeping everything straight. It is a sense of order in a chaos where everything does happen at once, and men walk through walls, and solidity means next to nothing.
I decided to use paint with deep colors as the medium for my painting. The painting itself is imperfect, but I am pleased with the end result. The brick wall is a metaphor for order, density, reliability. In the image the brick wall is old and imperfect. It also defies the very concept of a brick wall in the way it allows glimpses of the world behind to show through.
The image draws on inspiration from Magritte and an unknown Parisian sculptor but the idea is my own. I am very pleased with the way it all came together in the end. Time and matter as we know them are an illusion, and it all exists under the night sky, an expanse of infinite that we don’t know about yet.