Last July I wrote about painting the ocean, when I was doing my abstract picture "The Orange Sail." Now I am doing something more ambitious: I am painting lightning. I need to convey its brilliance in paint, including its purplish-pink color, which results from the ionization of nitrogen and oxygen in the air in its path. This takes quite a lot of painting as well as color strategy. I have to make sure that the lightning bolt will stand out from its background, which means that I have to plan the whole color scheme well ahead of time. Since acrylic painting is done in layers, I have to leave space for the lightning bolt in each layer I do. The lightning bolt is also done in layers: first a purplish one for the color, then white for the highlights.

There is more lightning elsewhere in the painting too, after all this is the "Angel of the Storm." White acrylic in its pure state is very, very bright because unlike white oil paint, the acrylic medium (the goo which holds the pigment together) is altogether colorless. With oil paint, the medium is a golden-colored oil of some kind, usually linseed, and that adds a warmth to all oil colors, even pure white. So if I were using oil paint to depict my lightning, I'd have to adjust it to be a bit bluer, and thus not as bright. I don't ever use oil paint, because it is smelly, toxic, messy, and a fire hazard. Many other artists these days avoid it all by working in digital media. I work with digital art and graphics, too, but when a private client orders an artwork, she doesn't want a CD plonked onto her desk. She wants a real live hand-done artwork that she can frame and put on her wall and show off to her friends. My digital stuff is done for commercial work.

All this art talk is an introduction to yet another riff on science and scientists. I often read Cosmic Variance," which is one of the most successful of the new crop of physics blogs that has sprung up in the last couple of years. The group of scientists at Cosmic are all perky, young, and attractive, and they're all desperately trying to tell us that scientists are just like "real people" who have hobbies and gourmet dinners and vacations and go to jazz concerts. Well, they can say all they want, but I know it is only hopeful publicity. Scientists are not just like "real people." They are better than real people. Why? Well, they're smarter, more energetic, more dedicated, more determined and forceful, and simply stronger both physically and mentally. After all, they have spent at least 20 years getting to where they can be professional scientists, from elementary school science fairs to postdoc stints in worthy laboratory places. They have survived brutal competition that would weaken a Navy SEAL. In the descriptions of physicists' lives, we always are told that not only does Joe Physicist spend incredibly long hours at his classes and research, he somehow makes time to climb 14,000 foot mountains and go to Central Africa for a total solar eclipse. And he complains about how hard it is to have conference meeetings from Tokyo to Paris to New York in just a week. Uh huh. The rest of us are not doing these things. The rest of us are trying to get our laundry done and opening up cans of Campbell's Soup for dinner.

I believe the stereotypes about scientists because I have, in my few encounters with them, found the stereotypes to be truer than the blog propaganda. One of my favorite descriptions of Physics Life comes from a wonderful book about physics and chemistry published by Time-Life back in the ancient age of 1963. It was in the "Life Science Library" series and was titled simply "Matter." This book was a major inspiration to me when I was young, not only because it was full of excellent text and photos of physics being done, but because it had beautifully rendered photographs of every element in its native, pure state. It had the gleam of gold and the glow of argon, the shine of chromium and the mysterious metallic chips of "rare earths." They had glorious names like "Samarium" and "Praseodymium" and "Lutetium." Gases were represented by a sealed vial, assumed to be containing oxygen or nitrogen, though without the lightning glow. And there were pictures of physicists and chemists, usually with their lab equipment or in an academic setting with the inevitable blackboard.

The captions of two of those physicists' portraits sum up for me what Physics Life really is all about. I will excerpt from them (names of physicists are withheld since they are still alive somewhere on this planet).

"…Possessed of a puckish sense of humor and a brilliant mind preoccupied with physics nearly 24 hours a day, T. discusses his favorite subject…in his work a command of mathematics is vital, since "equations are the tools." And he is "at work" almost continually. "Research is a constant thing," he says. "You cannot count the hours—almost all the hours in the day.…A Nobel Prize winner at 34, he believes that youth is an actual advantage in scientific work. "As you get older, you get less daring…When you are younger you pursue new ideas immediately. Have I lost my daring? I often ask myself that question."

Gosh, I wonder whether I ever HAD any daring! Here I am dutifully reviewing mathematical functions in my book, hoping to actually get to something calculus-like before the next decade. Do I have that kind of dedication? I look at scientists as kind of like "techno-mages," possessed of amazing and un-shareable skills and knowledge, able to bend time and space with their theories, able to perceive galaxies thirteen billion light years away, able to re-create the primal sparks of the Big Bang in their vast accelerators. They don't paint pictures of lightning, they create it.

Now some folks feel the same mythic way about artists that I feel about scientists. In fact, the romantic movement of the nineteenth century made up a myth about artists that has haunted those who do art ever since. It was artists who were special, artists who were like some sort of magicians, who could create reality from simple paint or pencil, who saw deeper into the world. Now, in our post-modern age, dominated by photography and technology, artists have lost their magic. It is the scientists who command the lightning, not the artists. And thus the artist who loves science is haunted by the unbreachable gap of energy and brilliance between art and science, where paint cannot possibly equal plasma.

Posted at 3:55 am | link