I haven't posted much recently to this Quality Art Product blog. This is because though I have done a lot of drawing and painting and digital art, none of it qualifies as quality art product. It might be fantasy art or science fiction or drawings of this or that, but it is not a serious effort. Nor do I post commercial work here. This blog is for fine art. In 2010 I finally put in the time and made a work of fine art.

This is a commission from a composer friend of mine. He chose four friends of his who were artists, and asked each one to come up with an artwork he would use as an inspiration for a piece of music. I am glad to be one of those friends. I am very interested to hear what he will create to go along with this picture. The multimedia concert is supposed to take place sometime this summer, with the paintings displayed where the music will be performed.

The title, Neutron Starlight, refers to the astronomical phenomenon that inspired this picture. Some big stars, when they run out of fuel, collapse into themselves and then explode in a huge blast, a supernova. What is left after the explosion is a superheavy core, spinning very fast and usually surrounded by a disc of glowing gases. This core also spins a jet of plasma off perpendicular to the disc. The core of the destroyed star is called a neutron star, because it is made of atoms so compressed by gravity that it is really a solid ball of neutrons, or degenerate matter. This extreme astronomical object is what I depict here. The twisted grids visible in the picture represent the distortion of spacetime created by the ultragravity of the star core.

The painting is acrylic on coated Masonite, 16 inches by 20 inches. It was painted mostly with an airbrush, a paint sprayer which is not usually used in fine arts. I paint my space pictures with airbrush because it delivers the textures that look most like space clouds and flames of plasma.

Posted at 2:37 am | link