Quantum theory shows us that things can defy common sense, but what if it is the other way around? Maybe we are the ones that are defying common sense. In fact, our knowledge is limited. There are actually so much things that we can't understand. For example, we aren't even sure what an electron is. Yes we know that it has wave-particle duality, but we cannot understand how. Why can't we understand it? Why can we understand so many other things but not the behaviour of electrons? How can we even end up having representations and equations for electrons, if we don't even know what exactly it is? In fact, these representations and equations may not be real, but it seems to make sense and explain the behaviour of electrons.
In fact, we don't really trust things that weren't seen because we are too dependent on our senses. We believe what we see as reality and truth; unfortunately, we do not always see the truth.
In my painting, I wanted to represent the moon illusion. The moon illusion is an illusion that the moon seems bigger when is closer to the horizon. However, the moon isn't actually bigger when it is closer to the horizon. Actually, our brain created this illusion. Until now, we only have hypothesis which try to explain it, but the real answer is still unknown. In the painting, the moon is way bigger than its reflection on the water because I want to represent the reflection of the water as reality, and above the horizontal as what we normally see.
Over the horizontal, the Sun is actually smaller than the moon. It is an exaggerated representation of one of the reasonable hypotheses that explain the moon illusion. In fact, when the sun is high in the sky, there is nothing around it for us to compare, which causes an illusion that the sun seems to be smaller. On the other hand, the moon is slightly over the horizon, where there should be a lot of objects for us to compare its size. In this case, since the dog in this painting is smaller than the moon already; it makes us feel like the moon is bigger than usual because there are smaller things close to it. Which create an illusion that makes the moon seems bigger. Note that in this painting the moon is literally bigger than the sun; it is only a representation of this hypothesis.
A demonstration of this illusion can be seen from this picture:
Note that the 2 balls in the center have exactly the same size.
Source: West, Adrian. The supermoon Illusion. N.p., 16 Mar. 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2011. <http://www.universetoday.com/83998/the-supermoon-illusion/>.
I paint the reflection of the white dog to be a black cat because I think that it represents the Quantum theory very well. In fact, we always believed that electrons are particles, but they can actually behave like a wave as well. The problem is that we aren't sure how they behave like a wave when they pass by 2 small slits, because when we are observing, electrons behave differently. So isn't it possible that while we are not observing, the dog may be something else? Actually, we would never know, because the only way to see the dog is to open our eyes to observe, so we can't actually know what would happen when we aren't observing.