Starry Art

We are bounded in a nutshell of Infinite Space: Week 9: Free Form #12: Starry Art

I have, in previous occasions, shown how I have wandered into the intersections of my interests/ hobbies with the study of astronomy. As could be seen from the usual type of post I write which doesn’t include the huge digression of mathematics, I tend to focus on art, history, and mythology, but none of these is nearer to me than art: the pursuit of representing the cross of the human spirit and the world we inhabit. Starting several years ago, I began to develop techniques and proper artistic ability through continuous exploration and reproduction, leading up to now being able to know what I have to improve, and identifying the ways the old masters created their art, in order to learn and apply what they developed to my style. As such, one of the paintings I produced in recent years was titled “Bent Light”:

Rodrgo Cordova, 2014

Here, I developed a piece made entirely with oil paints, based on the effect of a black hole on the perception of the light coming from distant celestial objects. It illustrates how the movement of light in distant galaxies is changed and distorted when a singularity in the fabric of space is put in its way, as is the case of a black hole (for more on lensing: check out http://ay16-rodrigocordova.blogspot.com/2015/09/what-does-microlensing-look-like.html ) The light is the constant, the limit, of the universe, the maximum speed of any object, particle, or wave. The ultimate expression of the maximum movement. This is what I tried to represent: the maximum movement of the universe, meeting with the epitome of the immovable object: a black hole. These two extremes are united in this picture, creating an incredible image in space which has been captured myriad times by telescopes on this Earth and above it. It is through images like this one that the beauty of the universe can be captured, not through elegant equations which rightly explain the universe, but do little to express its majesty. This is also true of how most images received from the telescopes finally arrives in the public eye: artists who interpret data and images with several filters in order to create the mystifying images of space we have seen for the past decades.

The artist’s role in astronomy is no less important than the developers of the telescope or the theorist behind the project, for they are all quintessential in understanding, interpreting, and appreciating the astronomy, harkening back to the first drawings of the Galilean moons and the craters of the Moon. We could not even picture our own Galaxy were it not for the artistic minds and hands which make dreams, imagination, and binary codes, into the illustrations of the world beyond ours.

Rodrgo Cordova, 2016