My artwork consists of a 15” x 30” painting of a night time scene being reflected. Everything in the scene is reflected except for the faceless girl lying on her side.
The girl represents beauty, so a message one could associate with this is that beauty is just a human creation and perception. We could also ask ourselves, does beauty really exist, or is it merely an illusion? In the painting, there is an outdoor, nature scene with the girl lying in the center. Everything is reflected except for the girl. This could represent the fact that nature is and will always be real, whereas the girl, “beauty”, is just a question of perception. Much like the quantum theory makes us doubt our perception of what is real and what is not, beauty is often not what it seems. In the famous Double Slit experiment, there mere act of observation had the power to influence the electron’s behaviour as either a particle or a wave. This relates to the pompous world of beauty, as the observation and opinions of others have the ability to change people.
In addition, I chose to incorporate the use of a “beautiful” girl as a sort of model. Much like in chemistry where the use of models to portray certain theories is prominent, the media uses models to show society how people “should” be. With time, past atomic models have been proven inaccurate, so the model keeps being recreated. Much like the artist Rene Magritte pointed out however, these models are still models. They are still artificial and are mere representations of what is (or what is believed to be) real. Again, this is why I did not show the model’s reflection in the water. She is not real.
Lastly, the use of dark colours was to provide an ambience of mystery. Since chemistry is the “youngest” of the branches of science, there is still so much left to discover. The darkness and the night are symbols for the unknown. The girl is faceless to show a lack of identity and human quality, as quantum cannot be directly compared with the macroscopic world. She does not have eyes to represent the limited field of vision humans have when examining our own world in new ways, such as quantum. If we are born with people telling us that something should be a certain way, it takes years of learning that other possibilities do exist.
In summary, beauty can be related to quantum, as it is based on human perception. The use of models is also common in many diverse fields of life, however models can only ever be representations of what we want them to be. Human perception has such a limited range; there is so much we cannot see. This is the wonder of perception: each set of eyes has a different set of opinions and observations. To conclude, perception is a thing of beauty, yet beauty itself is mere perception.