Painting Science

You all know that I am a science loving geek that paints weird physics concepts. I am a synesthete. That is someone with crossed senses. When I listen to music, I can see colors. Numbers and mathematical equations create songs in my mind which in turn get translated to colors. My imagination is an interesting place to live in. I never really thought about the way I perceived things was unusual, I thought everyone did. I grew up in a family of scientists and artists so you can see why I thought it was normal. I would look through my father’s microscope and paint what I saw. My mom still has one of my first abstract oil paintings from age 5 or 6 based on my views of bacteria. I also painted realistic still life and landscapes with my great aunt Santa Duran.

I have always danced between making art and studying science.  All artists and creators are great observers of what is around them. If you paint realistically, you pay attention to the light, shadows, colors and details. Portrait painting is about not only capturing the face but the essence of a person. Abstract art is a bit trickier to portray since you do not have an identifiable subject, so I observe ideas and concepts along with nature. How does science interact with what I am imagining?

When I finally made it back to college in my thirties, I wanted to study consciousness. I went to a university based in behaviorism, which means it was usually animal studies. I wasn’t going to work in the rat labs, so I went into Cognitive Science within the psychology department. I told my mentor I wanted to study consciousness and he said I couldn’t because it wasn’t quantifiable. Well, that was in the 90’s and now this is an important area of research. I finished my bachelor’s degree in science and went on to explore consciousness via fine art.

I love science because it explores ideas, yet it is open to possibilities and change. Once proven, the concepts are held as theory not truth, until they are disproven, and a new theory emerges. My ideas that I paint are like that. During an outdoor art show in my hometown of Santa Fe, NM, I entered into a discussion with a particle physicist from our neighboring science labs in Los Alamos. I had painted an image that depicted quarks and muons. As we discussed them, he finally said that this was as good an image of them as he could imagine. I replied that with art I created my impressions, but I didn’t have to prove it to anyone, and I didn’t need to do the math. He got a laugh and bought the piece.

I have often painted what I imagine theoretical concepts in physics to look like. Time is a particular concept I play with. Eternity is something I have been contemplating since I was very young, even before I developed abstract reasoning. Humans are hard wired to make sense of the world. We tell stories, encode and organize information and paint what we are thinking, imagining, seeing and feeling. We strive to create and make sense of our place in the universe. The genres of creating can take many forms from painting, music, architecture and building, writing and even cooking.

But what is it that we are really striving for? I still say it is consciousness and not just the simple encoding and retrieval of information in our brains as I learned in my cognitive science courses. Consciousness is the striving to be connected with a universal truth that resonates beyond us and the world we know. When I look into the night sky, my imagination can take me beyond the limitations of this reality. I think that is what consciousness is for artists and creators. Take some time for yourself to gaze at something beyond your comprehension and imagine what it is possible. The new images coming from the Webb Telescope, the face of a newborn, the fleeting moments of time or the possibility that time is circular. That is what I love to paint. What about you?