I've slightly changed one of the paintings, TROPOS 1, from the last post. I don't know whether such changes are improvements but there has to come a point when one must stop and work on something else. The more I looked at it the more I felt that the sun was trying to break through in its downward passage behind those layers of cloud and that the reflections on the calm undulating sea needed to sparkle more in some way. Such changes can diminish a painting's essential energy or mysterious character but you have to take the risk and change it if your intuition tells you to keep going. That's where a crazily ambitious plan to make a 31-piece installation of these paintings, one for each day of the Polarstern cruise from 2016, in collaboration with my atmospheric scientist colleagues from Leipzig University, would enable me to explore the memory of this whole adventure. The works would collide together the precise empirical yet abstract-looking 'facts' of science with my subjective, embodied recollections and feelings about the voyage, especially the atmosphere of the time and the place on successive days which are encapsulated in my diary/sketchbook.
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| Tropos 1, 30 Jan 2019, acrylic and laser print on paper on canvas |
When I look at Tropos 1 it's as though the event of the sunset is happening even though I know the patterns of pigment and print are stationary. Sunset's like these change imperceptibly and staring at the painting evokes that sense of imperceptible change, a perception I don't get from the frozen moments of photographs. Is this related to Bergson's notion of duration in which our experience of time is illusory? Reading Fritjof Capra's
Tao of Physics (once again) yesterday I'm struck by how much particle physicists like Feynman in the mid 20th century stretched their imaginations in an effort to grasp the paradoxical things that seemed to be going on in the particle collision chambers. This involved accepting that a particle like an electron can at the same time be a wave, the wave-particle duality, depending on how you look at it and the possibility that during particle interactions (collisions) time can go in either direction, or more accurately that there is an interconnected web of interactions across the entire universe that transcends time because it occupies a space-time in which time cannot be treated as separate from space, even though that's exactly what we do in everyday life.
My painting compresses 3-D space into an almost 2-D one, albeit cropped into a rectangle, but perhaps it also collapses time into 'duration'. The scientific data encapsulates both time and space as the laser beam travelled up to 8km and was backscattered 8km down again to reach the photo receptors on the helideck. Also the ship moved across the surface of the sea, whilst (secretly) the sun went down and the moon rose up.
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| TROPOS container on RV Polarstern helideck with green laser beam, Dec 23rd 2016. |
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| Crepuscular sun rays begin to appear, 31 Jan 2019 |
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| The rays strengthen. Lidar backscatter data is still clearly visible behind the paint.,1 Feb 2019. |
A reminder of the underlying backscatter data over which the landscape was painted.
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| 24 days of TROPOS lidar backscatter data from the English Channel to the coast of South Africa. Laser print on paper on canvas. |
