Gravitational Waves

A newly completed this commission for IX Arts, which will be on display at the IX show in October. The allegorical image of merging black holes is a poetic representation of recently observed waves of gravity.

Since our ancestors first looked up at the stars, everything we've observed of the universe has come in the form of light: electromagnetic waves. In the last century we've learned everything we know from looking at every part of the electromagnetic spectrum and analyzing that light. For the first time in 2015, humans observed energy arriving at earth of a different sort than electromagnetic light.

1.4 billion years ago, two black holes spiraled around each other and merged, releasing three solar masses of energy in the form of gravitational waves, literal stretching and squashing of space. If you had been nearby the waves could have squeezed you to spaghetti, but when they spread out and passed through earth in 2015 we detected those waves, dissipated to less than the width of an atomic nucleus. Our whole lives, these waves have periodically passed right through us, unnoticed, but now humanity has gained the eyes to see them.

Oil, 30 x 30 inches

More about Gravitational Waves

Deep Sleep

Nestled in our comfy spot amongst the stars. This small study for a larger painting will be available on Every Day Original tomorrow morning!

Oil Study, 6 x 8 inches

OPA Demo

I'm excited to be giving a painting demonstration at the Oil Painters of America National Convention in Steamboat Springs, CO, on June 3rd!

The OPA National Juried Exhibition is always a great show and I'm pleased to have "Magnificent Universe" selected to participate in this year's exhibition. Come see the show and watch me paint!

Magnificent Universe, Oil, 18 x 24 inches

Goldfish

New Bioluminescence for Abend Gallery's 10x10 show opening this Saturday. 

Oil, 10 x 10 inches

Hubble Study

My next small study goes up on Every Day Original tomorrow morning!

Since it's launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has produced some of our most spectacular images of the universe. Hubble's observations narrowed our knowledge of the age of the universe to a decimal point of accuracy (13.7 billion years instead of 10-20 billion). In 1995, the spirit of discovery led the Hubble team to point the telescope at the darkest patch of sky they could find to see if there was anything there. In a patch of sky the size of a pinhead at arms length, the Hubble Deep Field observation revealed 3,000 galaxies stretched out to distances of up to 13 billion lightyears. It was our first nearly complete view of the entire history of the universe in one image. Check out this video about it.

The HST is nearing the end of it's life. While there are many space telescopes that preform many functions, Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch just next year!

Oil Study, 6 x 8 inches

Nestled in Nebulae

Made of starstuff, we are in this universe, and the universe is in us. May this unity help you to feel comfort in your surroundings.

A small study available tomorrow on Every Day Original.

Oil 6x8 inches

Human Light

Reason, Compassion, and Hope are the ideals celebrated by the Humanist winter solstice holiday of Human Light on December 23rd, and the titles of these three small paintings. Happy Holidays!

These paintings will appear in Abend Gallery's Annual Miniatures Exhibition opening Saturday night. 

Bioluminescence - Compassion
Oil, 8 x 10 inches

Bioluminescence - Hope
Oil, 8 x 10 inches

Bioluminescence - Reason
Oil, 8 x 10 inches

Hidden in the Light

Spectroscopy is a method of measuring light split into it's spectrum, as by a prism. The atoms of every element emit and absorb specific wavelengths of light which appear as a specific pattern of bands or gaps in it's light spectrum. As we attempt to learn about our vast universe while confined to our tiny vantage point of earth, spectroscopy is how we know what distant planets, stars, and galaxies are made of, their mass, temperature, and more, without needing to travel to them. It's even how we know that our universe is expanding. Very distant galaxies don't just happen to emit more red light, the pattern of their emissions spectrum is red shifted and thus racing away from us in all directions. There is a beautiful wealth of knowledge hidden in the light!

Oil Study, 6 x 8 inches

This study will be up on Every Day Original tomorrow!

More on spectroscopy: https://youtu.be/jjy-eqWM38g?t=5m32s

A Tremendous Mess of Waves

“It's kind of incredible, because when I'm looking at you, someone standing at my left can see someone who is standing at my right. . . . completely undisturbed . . . So that there is this tremendous mess of waves [photons] . . . all through the same space, all these things are going on at the same time . . . there's not only information of my vision of you, but information from Moscow radio, being broadcast at the present moment and the singing of someone from Peru. All the radio waves are just the same kind of waves only longer waves. And there's the radar from an airplane which is looking at the ground to figure out where it is, which is coming through this room at the same time. Plus the x-rays, cosmic rays, and all the other things which are the same kind of waves, but shorter, faster [higher frequency], or longer, slower [lower frequency]. It's exactly the same thing. So this big field, this area of irregular motions of this electric field, this vibration, contains this tremendous amount of information. And it's all really there. . . . you've got to stop and think about it to really get the pleasure of the complexity, the inconceivable nature of nature.”
- Richard Feynman (https://youtu.be/eqtuNXWT0mo?t=37m40s)

Oil Study, 6 x 8 inches

Magnificent Universe

"Perhaps the most wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our most cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors has been replaced by a cold, immense, indifferent Universe in which humans are relagated to obscurity. But I see the emergence in our consciousness of a Universe of a magnificence, and an intricate, elegant order far beyond anything our ancestors imagined. And if much of the Universe can be understood in terms of a few simple laws of Nature, those wishing to believe in God can certainly ascribe those beautiful laws to a Reason underpinning all of Nature. My own view is that it is far better to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be.
Whether we will acquire the understanding and wisdom necessary to come to grips with the scientific revelations of the twentieth century will be the most profound challenge of the twenty-first."
-Carl Sagan

Oil, 18 x 24 inches

Interstellar Voyager

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Voyager 1 launch, the first human spacecraft to leave the solar system.

"The Voyager record would include greetings in sixty human languages and one whale language, an evolutionary audio essay, 116 pictures of life on Earth and ninety minutes of music from a glorious diversity of the world's cultures. The engineers projected a one-billion-year shelf life for the golden phonograph records.
"How long is a billion years? In a billion years the continents of Earth would be so altered that we would not recognize the surface of our own planet. One thousand million years ago, the most complex life forms on Earth were bacteria. In the midst of the nuclear arms race, our future, even in the short term seemed a dubious prospect. Those of us privileged to work on the making of the Voyager message did so with a sense of sacred purpose. It was conceivable that, Noah-like, we were assembling the ark of human culture, the only artifact that would survive into the unimaginably far distant future."
- Ann Druyan

This painting will be up on Every Day Original tomorrow morning at 10:30 eastern time.

Oil, 6 x 8 inches

See the photos included on Voyager's golden record below or listen to it's recordings: 

Representing Textural Paintings on Screen

I wrote a blog post for the Oil Painters of America on the topic of photographing textural paintings. It was published a few weeks ago, but there were technical issues with the images that weren't fixed until now:

http://blog.oilpaintersofamerica.com/2017/08/representing-textual-paintings-screen/

Harbor Sunset detail, 8 x 10 inches
(animated image flips between even and raking light photos)

Bioluminescence VI

One of two new bioluminescence paintings that will be showing in Abend Gallery's next show, Variance, opening tomorrow night. Come by and see the show if you're in the Denver area!

Bioluminescence VI, Oil, 14 x 18 in

Solar Eclipse

The eclipsing moon reveals the sun's glowing corona. This painting wil be up on Every Day Original on Monday, the day of the eclipse.

"Imagine it's 10,000 years ago... You're out hunting or planting seeds, or whatever, and the sun, the giver of all light and heat, turns black. You'ld probably want to figure that out."
Check out this great video from Oregon Public Broadcasting about the eclipse

"A lot of early civilizations feared eclipses. They were seen as an attack on the sun or moon by the forces of darkness, but now that we understand our place in space, eclipses are an occasion for awe and for gratitude. All over the galaxy rocks are casting shadows on other rocks, but only here, as far as we know, is there someone to notice them."
-Joss Fong (Vox)

"If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians or mystics, but you'll do much better with scientists ... They can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance ... Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy ... There isn't a religion on the planet that doesn't long for a comparable ability - precise, and repeatedly demonstrated before committed skeptics - to foretell future events. No other human institution comes close. Is this Worshiping at the altar of science? ... Far from idolatry, this is the means by which we can distinguish the false idols from the real thing."
-Carl Sagan
The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark

Solar Eclipse, Oil, 7x7 inches

Cassini, Final Observations

"After almost 20 years in space, NASA's Cassini spacecraft begins the final chapter of its remarkable story of exploration: its Grand Finale.

Between April and September 2017, Cassini will undertake a daring set of orbits that is, in many ways, like a whole new mission. Following a final close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan, Cassini will leap over the planet's icy rings and begin a series of 22 weekly dives between the planet and the rings."

This study will be up on Every Day Original tomorrow morning at 10:30 eastern time.

Watch this video about Cassini form NASA, or read more here.

Oil Study, 6 x 8in