Temple's TangleWave Art Gallery: Biodiversity

==Biodiversity==

I have long been interested in creating torque via paint. I particularly enjoy organizing color and composing flat space to create the illusions of motion and depth. These specific skills, I think, are directly applicable to the surprising, tubular, spherical and somewhat abstract quality of organelles, especially as micrographs suffer by being 2-dimensional representations of three dimensional forms. Given the dynamic nature of the organelles in vivo and the fact that the cells viewed under the microscope are inevitably chemically "fixed," the call for dynamic painterly explorations of these realms seems all the more pressing.

Since electron micrographs have the further disadvantage of being monochromatic, the possibilities for imaginative and emotive interpretation are vast. Indeed, it is extraordinary that so few painters, as yet, have attempted to navigate the cellular dimension of the natural world. From an artistic perspective, the elegant, almost otherworldly and strangely beautiful intricacies of the cell remain markedly unexplored.

The possibilities for all sorts of new associations are endless. Aside from looking downright "biomorphic," the three dimensional surfaces created in the lab by a process called freeze fracturing can yield "landscapes" that, when magnified, look much like the cratered surfaces of moons and planets. Similar surfaces are sometimes grafted by the wind onto snow, a fact one cannot fail to observe if one has spent as much time as I have traipsing through winter fields. Such observations of multifarious reticulation give me pause to wonder whether there is anything innate about the "drive to abstraction."