Insight and Allusion – works on exhibit, online version

This gallery contains 9 photos.

Regina Valluzzi Insight and Allusion   Works on exhibit 781-643-1368                                                       rv@NerdlyPainter.com Athan’s European Bakery & … Continue reading →

Counterpoint around a primary color

Three new paintings in acrylic using circles as a geometric motif.  One is centered on yellow, another on red another on blue.  These are 24×24 inches on canvas with 0.75 inch stretchers and are each $450.00 through June 7 (a special for the Beacon Hill Art Walk).

Each primary color counterpoint presents a unique challenge.

“Yellow Counterpoint” acrylic on canvas with raised features extruded through a pastry bag. 24 x 24 inches.

“Red Counterpoint” acrylic on canvas with raised features extruded through a pastry bag. 24 x 24 inches.

“BlueCounterpoint” acrylic on canvas with raised features extruded through a pastry bag. 24 x 24 inches.

Each color loses its psychological identity in different contexts.  A light red is an orange or pink, dark yellows quickly shade to brown and gold, while very light and dark blues can read as neutral black and white.

One challenge in each of these counterpoints was creating an interesting dynamic of color saturation and intensity while maintaining the identity and character of each primary color.  Bringing in bits of secondary color help to emphasize the blueness of the blues, the redness of the reds and the yellow nature of the Yellow Counterpoint.

Another challenge was creating visual interest, rhythm, and yes – contrapuntal motion – with a simple geometric and color motif in each work.  The simplified geometry of only circles helps create the rhythm and the idea of contrapuntal motion.  The rhythm of the shapes and their pattern dominates.  Adding other shapes, for example squares, would create a distracting ambiguity that (I believe) would detract from the counterpoint.

Metallic color, transparent and translucent forms and layers, and the use of extruded gel shapes on the canvas all help to create visual interest.  They define the span of the individual circular elements, ground the rhythmic and contrapuntal ideas, and keep the pieces active and focused.

 

I was a double major at MIT, complete with two these.  One major was Materials Science (Thesis on diacetylene/polyurethane cross polymers).  The other was Humanities, specifically music theory and composition.  After spending those years learning contrapuntal harmony and composition, these works seemed …necessary.  I learned about Bessel Functions as an Undergraduate – as part of my music degree.  Kettle drums have a resonance that provides a very good example of a type of Bessel function (put something granular on the drum head before you whack it and you’ll see the pattern).  They came up years later as part of some advanced graduate level coursework in crystallography and scattering.  The professor was a bit surprised, but of course I knew about all sorts of Bessel Functions – I was a music major.

No Bessel functions here, but the rings do make me think of intersecting wavefronts, like ripples on a pond.  If only phase information wasn’t lost in acrylic painting …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chris Bathgate – sculpture or surface science?

A Chris Bathgate sculpture from the end of 2011

Admit it – you want one.   You’re trying to figure out where in your institute (or home) this will sit, and how to justify it in your budget.  Want to see more?  Visit Chris Bathgate’s website for works in progress, images of the pieces of the pieces being made, videos and more.

If you’ve ever worked with high vacuum systems, tight tolerance machined apparati, and lots of detectors and probes, you may be  used to seeing things like this (below).  There’s something magical, almost science fiction about seeing a cluster of high vacuum probes for the very first time.

Image of an ESCA system (Electron Spectroscopy for Surface Analysis) made by Euroscan Instruments

Have you ever looked at an array of highly machined precision – functional – equipment and thought the polished curves were almost art?  Worthy of the focused intent of a superlative sculptor, perhaps?  Sculptor Chris Bathgate has been using his in-depth knowledge of machining and unique appreciation for metal forms to create unique yet vaguely … familiar… sculptures.  His streamlined forms echo the tight tolerance precision machined equipment that so many scientists have come to know and love.

His pieces have numbers rather than names.  Below are ST 732232835563624434 and  DC35555

Recognition, gratitude – May 2012

A bit of news and a bit of thanks here in short palatable paragraphs.

Diagram issue 12.2 is out online, and features 3 images of my work:  Origins of Species, Bingham Fluid, and Tadpole Diagrams at Play.  Woo hoo!  (My page is here)

Another drawing “Queen of the Afternoon” has been accepted into Black Fox Literary magazine.  More info as that develops.

I’ve gotten a few mentions for this blog lately, and they’ve really helped people find me and my work.  A bit of thanks are in order.

The MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering has featured my show and link on the DMSE news page,  which is run by DMSE communications director, Rachel Kemper.

Two other blogs have mentioned my work.  Backreaction is by a Physics couple (sounds familiar) Sabine Hossenfelder and Stefan Scherer, while Digits in motion is the personal blog  of Adam Adamou and is heavily focused on Economics.

On Linked In, we’ve just formed a new group for Science folks with an interest in the Visual arts (artists welcome too):  Linked In group

Events and a Promotion (sale)

More art events coming up this weekend.  Now that Spring has come and gone and a grey wet chill has settled in … it’s Open Studios and Art Walk season!  Yay!

1.  The Somerville Open Studios is this weekend, May 5 and 6 all over Somerville.  There are several major studio complexes in Somerville including Joy Street and Vernon Street Studios. If you go to check it out, stop by and say hello to my friend Carl Gruesz in the Vernon Street complex.  He does some interesting work with LED’s and other light sources and optics.

I’ll be over at the Burren, with a number of other out of town artists (The Burren in Davis Square).  They are having their SLAM artists event as part of the Somerville open Studios, and I’ll be there with reproductions, maybe some small original paintings.  Whatever I bring has to be fairly resistant to beer.  Stop by to see me on Saturday between noon and 6 (I’m elsewhere on Sunday)

Some drawings that will be available as reproductions at the Burren’s SLAM event:

Orbits of Joy                           Biology of an Idea                        Size Exclusion Chromatography

2.  On Sunday around midday, the brand new alternative space in Boston’s South End (drumroll)…. The B&B Gallery at 14 Union Park will be hosting an Open House from 12 -2 PM.  They have gathered a pretty impressive and varied group of artists for their first group show.  I have 5 original drawings on exhibit:

Details of a Device for the      Archimedes                 D-branes                      Cellular                       Intracellular

Manufacture of Dreams            Chiral                                                              Generation                     Diversion

               

 

3.  For the next few days I’m running some promotions on giclees through Fine Art America (FAA).  All three pieces offered as promotions are fairly 2-D paintings.  There is some brush texture (captured in the imaging for the giclees).  However there aren’t raised and sculpted forms, active lenses, layered transparent regions, or any of the other things I like to incorporate that make reproduction difficult.  These are paintings that should reproduce extremely well as giclees.

FAA produces beautiful archival giclees on  stretched canvas, and they won’t print images that aren’t crystal clear down to the tiniest detail. They are working with artists to provide very low pricing on limited promotional quantities of giclees – provided that they fit certain sizes.  The first two are giclees of paintings in my Solo Exhibition, “Insight and Allusion“, at Athan’s in  Brighton.  The giclees at actual size, on gallery wrapped canvas are under $100.00 each.  The third is a seascape painted for Becky, the jealous cat.

Song of Solar Fusion -promo page    Subtle Machinery – promo page  

 

Seascape with White Cats – Promo page

Until a little later – have a good humpday!

Materials for Art and Art for Materials

If you’ve been poking around my not-quite-finished website and blog, you may have noticed that there are some posts on artists materials, and also on general materials science illustrated with art and artists’ materials.  What is missing from this picture?  Ah yes … art about Materials Science.  Perhaps it’s time to point out some  paintings with sneaky and not-so-sneaky materials science, condensed matter, and chemistry subjects.  I’ll cover drawings in a separate post- later.

Mosaicity (Sold)                                                                             Eyeing G (Sold)

mixed media on linen 12 x 18 inches                                        mixed media on linen 12 x 18 inches

Red bubble cards and photo prints                                           Red bubble cards and photo prints

 

The first group are fairly literal.  Mosaicity and Eyeing G are concept driven, and hold fairly closely to the scientific concepts that inspired them.  They contain creative interpretations of data and technical graphics associated with polycrystalline mosaic structure and thermal analysis of semicrystalline polymers (DSC) respectively.  These were both commissioned pieces for another MIT Materials Science alum.  As commissions, they are both already sold but small prints and cards are still available through RedBubble (Mosaicity here, Eyeing G here).  Mosaicity was created by layering “crystalline” regions with oil paint over an acrylic background that also had a softly mosaic texture.  This creates a feeling of volume and depth.  Different symmetry elements, lattice structures, and defects (polymer focused) were painted into the domains in the mosaic with a fine brush, or scratched in with a fine point silicone nib.  Nothing is to scale or precisely “technical”, but I can imagine having a bit of fun with the science tucked into the painting.  Eyeing G is all about thermal analysis of polymers with both crystal melting and a glass transition.  Typical DSC curves are overlaid with blocks of color.  The arrangement of the blocky colored areas and their predominant color suggest different phases and types of order.  Softening  and curving of the edges of the blocky regions suggests the second order phase transition from glass to rubbery liquid.  The actual shapes of melting crystalline domains are echoed as well.

Thick Film Birefringence, Schlieren Chiarascuro, and Vector Field all take their inspiration from liquid crystals.  The two smaller pieces are creative interpretations of polarizing microscope images, while Vector Field plays with the Frank Free energy.  For a good introduction to liquid crystals try this pdf presentation from Denis Andrienko in Mainz.

Thick Film Birefringence                                                                     Schlieren Chiarascuro

Oil on panel, 5×5 inches                                                                      oil on linen,  12 x12 inches

Thick film birefringence isn’t very informative if one is trying to analyze a sample in the polarizing microscope.  There are too many layers, too much bulk material, too many trapped stresses and strains, bubbles and other artifacts.  Sometimes it’s worthwhile to just look at the messy failed samples.  Even if there’s little or no information there, they are reminders of the wonder and the worlds within worlds that bring many of us (and the new crops of students) into Materials research.  Schlieren Chiarascuro incorporates the dark schlieren lines where the liquid crystal orientation acts like a set of polarizers and blocks light transmission.  In the painting the schlieren are emphasized using heavy glossy gel media.  The lighter tracery patterns are disclinations and grain structures from a number of different liquid crystals and mesophasic soft solids.  In reality they shouldn’t all occur together.  Schlieren Chiarascuro is a bit of a lump sum record of years of observing.  The changing orientation of the liquid crystalline molecules in between the schlieren and other distinct textures often creates a gradation of birefringence colors, like the shaded chiarascuro in an Old Master’s painting – just with molecules instead of a brush.

                                                      Vector Field  (original is sold, giclee prints are available)

                                                                                       30 x 30, oil on canvas

Vector Field is inspired by my initial encounter with Frank’s concise and elegant approach to elasticity and deformations in liquid crystals.  His free energy terms using simple div grad and curl are mapped onto schematics of splay twist and bend in the painting.  Somwhere there are pages of my old notes trying to sort orientation from data on liquid crystals.  I’m afraid they look a good bit like the wild arrow party in Vector Field.

My good friend Peggy Cebe has built an ellipsometer to map out the optical properties of thin films.  Her data can be used to infer orientation in liquid crystals (it maps the fast optical axis rather than directly mapping the axis of the rod-like molecule).  When the data is crunched, the maps are arrays of little color coded pointing arrows.

Elastic Dialogue, Nano Night Music, and Subtle Machinery all touch on hierarchical order and the development of nanostructure.

Elastic Dialogue                                                                  Nano Night Music                  

Oil on Canvas, 20 x 24                                                       Oil on canvas, 24 x 36            

 

 

Subtle Machinery

 Oil on panel, 18 x 24

Percolation on a lattice, Lattice Animals, and Associations are attempts at conceptualizing the onset of solidity and gelation and some common lattice approaches to cooperative percolated phenomena.

Percolation on a Lattice

Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches

Lattice Animals (Sold)                                                                                  Associations

oil on linen, 12 x 12 inches                                                                   oil on line, 12 x 16 inches

 

Sharing cats with the Neutrino guy (Physics Art)

My background is broadly in Materials Science, but the subjects of my drawings and paintings range all over the Physical, Biomedical, and even Social Sciences with a little Engineering for good measure.  Perhaps I should explain.  A lot of my friends are scientists too.  So are their friends.. and so on.  It doesn’t take too many handshakes to wind up deep in another field, and I’ve always been interested in what other people do, why, and how they got there.

For example, I share a home, 3 cats and my precious set of screwdrivers and wrenches with a man whose background is in theoretical Physics.  (sharing household tools with a theorist can be an interesting proposition)   I worked on Biopolymers; Plamen worked on neutrino oscillations.  In a strange way, we met because of solar neutrinos.  He brought them up; I knew what he was talking about because the HEP group at Tufts was right downstairs from my friends in Condensed Matter Physics; we managed to date.

Plamen with Becky, the jealous cat

Many of my more “Physics with a capital P” pieces were painted with Plamen in mind.  When I work on something outside my expertise, I’ll bring him in somewhere in the middle of the painting just to make sure I’m getting it right.  We both recognize that there’s a creative interpretive component to painting too.  These aren’t technical diagrams, but they do communicate.  Even if we’re the only two people in the world who know that that painting “got it right” as  far as the Physics.  They are abstracts, after all.

Some examples of “Plamen-inspired” paintings and drawings are below:

Vacuum Energy                                                                           Song of Solar Fusion

20 x 24 inches, oil on canvas                                                     18 x 24 inches, oil on panel

 

Vacuum Energy is an artists interpretation of SPace-time “foaminess”.  Since I have an active visual imagination, I can’t help but see that foaminess bubbling up into fleeting subatomic entities in the energy of a high vacuum.  Song of Solar Fusion is an artists interpretation of mapping all of those complex solar processes onto a simplifying grid to see what emerges.  Many of the models and coarse graines descriptions I’ve encountered seemed to have an odd music about them.

D-branes

ink on paper, 11 x 14 inches

Dance of the Gauge Bosons in Vacuum

36×48 inches, oil on linen

Tadpole Diagrams at Play

Oil on linen, 16 x 16 inches

D-Branes, Dance of the Gauge Bosons in Vacuum and Tadpole Diagrams at Play involve creative and somewhat whimsical re-use of common symbols and symbolic ideas in Physics (with that capital “P”).  Ever since I was a girl, there’s always been a corner of my mind that imagined numbers and symbols as animate. I’ve often caught myself assigning personalities and backstories to my mathematical objects.  What do they do when they finish working for us, and where do they go home to chill?  I believe these works of art give appropriate neighborhoods to some hard working mathematical ideas.  I’m not sure the tadpole diagrams are actually hard-working, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Rube Goldberg abstract

42 x 48 inches, oil on canvas

Music of the Spheres

30 x 30 inches, Oil on canvas

Rube Goldberg Abstract and Music of the Spheres both use geometric motifs that are vaguely CERN-ish.  I walked past great big mounted collider beauty shots every day for about a decade, thanks to the HEP group downstairs.  The imagery gets into one’s brain.  If we look at how our understanding of the universe has progressed, there were theories that became increasing complex and kludgey until a new insight once again created an apparent simplicity and elegance.  Sort of like the glass shells containing all the heavenly bodies moving with the “Music of the Spheres” gave way to a heliocentric solar system.  In our own time this process seems to be accompanied by discussions about the “End of Science”.  With a new insight possibly on the horizon it feels like the right time to contemplate the Music of the Spheres.

Reblogged from Abstract Artist Group of New England (and Experimental):

The preview for my exhibit at Athan’s is updated with more complete information. Final image list is up with pricing, purchasing information and images ordered to match the layout of the exhibit.

Sorry about the convoluted reblogs - still learning Wordpress. The gallery/preview page for my exhibit in Brighton, "Insight and Allusion" has been updated. The image list is now the complete finalized version, images are in order according to the exhibit layout, and there are media size and price descriptions for each piece. For now email me at RValluzzi@comcast.net if you are interested in a painting. If you need paypal or credit card purchasing set up I'll do it for the pieces that interest you.

nano-night-music

Diagrammatical

I just finished going over the online proofs of my images and text for Diagram magazine.  Sorry – not allowed to share the proofs page (you’ll just have to wait).  I enjoy popping in to the Diagram online presence.  It’s an art and literary magazine organized around odd diagrams and everything diagram like.  It’s about the most fun I’ve had reading a journal online (though I wish the one with the gumballs hadn’t gone kaput).  I’ve found that most of the small press editors are pretty good-natured, and I’ve learned something about Arizona’s experiment in camel mail.  Perhaps even something true.

My personal favorite diagram has yet to make an appearance in the Diagram magazine.  I’ve always had a strange fondness for the sunset diagram (but not for the underlying math – ouch).  The sunset diagram is one of the simplest diagrams for describing fields where the polymer paths or the particle paths (or whatever you’re studying paths) are no longer independent.  It introduces coupling of interactions, and it’s an oddly poetic little beastie.

Here’s a picture of something (an ink drawing) NOT appearing in Diagram (spoiler avoidance!)

It’s called Entropic Repulsions, and is a few tweaks away from an acceptable technical diagram on entropic repulsion.  It’s also quite small, around 5×7 inches.  Purchase the original through Art Venue, or a giclee through Fine Art America

At some point I’ll have to post about “Acceptable” technical graphics and the hidden semiotics of science imagery.  Need more coffee for that though.   After the gap – a bit of nerdliness.  Click an arrow or something if you’re phobic about science (no math here yet – haven’t figured out WordPress equations)

What are entropic repulsions?  You really want to know? You really want to know.  Oh so warm and fuzzy-happy!  Let me explain…  Entropy is popularly defined as “chaos and disorder”.  A somewhat more accurate way to describe entropy is “number of configurations”.  There are different flavors of entropy too – different entropic contributions to free energy.  In high school and college chemistry we all learn about a mysterious “chemical” entropy fudge factor. In a dedicated Thermodynamics class you might see mixing entropy and the entropy associated with phase transitions (water to steam is common).  In polymers, there are additional contributions to entropy.  These arise because a polymer is made of a bunch of smaller molecules linked together to form a floppy chain.  The floppiness of the polymer chain allows it to take many distinct floppy shapes or conformations.  More shapes = more configurations = more entropy (simply stated).

So how can this type of entropy be used to push things apart?  How does conformational entropy translate into an “entropic repulsion”? Think about what happens to a floppy molecule in different circumstances.  When it’s in a solution, it’s pretty much free to flop about and explore all of its different possible shapes.  But what happens when it’s near a wall?  If the wall is close enough, then the floppy molecule can only explore flattened shapes that avoid the wall.  It loses entropy near a wall, when one end is tied down, and even when it’s twined around a dense concentration of other floppy molecules (they all have to avoid one another).

Everything tends towards greater total entropy.  If there are floppy molecules around, they’ll be driven to increase their entropy (right up to the point where there’s too large an entropic cost somewhere else in they system).  If a little bead is coated with floppy molecules, all tied down at one end, the free ends of those molecules will be driven to remain as free and unfettered as possible.  When two coated beads approach one another the free ends of the floppy molecules in the coatings will want to avoid being constrained by even more floppy-molecule-ends.  The effect is a repulsion due to entropy.  This is one approach used to keep tiny particles from sticking together in processing.

If you’re looking at my “entropic repulsions” not-really-a-technical-diagram, can you find where the science is illustrated?  I will entertain and respond to both your  well-thought out analyses and your wild-ass guesses in the comments.

 

I’m not a neuroscientist … (Neural Network)

I’m not a neuroscientist, but I’ve always been fascinated by things like expert systems, heuristics, and emergent properties in complex systems.  Occasionally I’ll paint something with a clear neuro theme because it’s the clearest and most concise approach to my fascination with all of those “complexity” driven subjects.  I have created  ink drawings like “Biology of an Idea”, colored drawings like  “Orbits of Joy”, and “Learning Circuit” (from left to right, below) and paintings like “Dendritic Echoes” and “Neural Network”.

(Purchasing Information at the bottom of the page)

Neural Network is a personal favorite.  It’s one of those paintings that I wasn’t sure of at first, but it keeps growing on me.  And I’ve always loved the little lens lights inside it and the way they activate one by one in rows as a viewer walks across the painting.  Here it is in neutral photo studio lighting and then below that in a retroreflective snapshot.

“Neural Network” acrylic on canvas with lenses and retroreflective spheres. 24×24×1.5 inches.  First Image is in diffuse light, second image is in directional light.

Neural Network is a play on two core ideas.  There’s a notion that’s been kicking around artificial intelligence for decades,  a neural network as a heuristic that processes complex information.  Of course a neural network can also be an actual biological network of neurons.  Painted, poured, layered and sculpted motifs reminiscent of neurons connect across the painting and flow into one another.  Under diffuse “neutral” light, the neuron image dominates, while the glass optics remain inactive and nearly invisible.  With a change in viewing angle various lenses begin to manipulate the ambient light in patterns, rather like information being transmitted.  Somehow it seems fitting to use light – photons – to represent information transmission.

Depending on light and viewing angle, the lenses appear “lit up”.  There are no lights incorporated, only lenses that manipulate the room light.  The lenses are in different conditions as the light in the room changes or as a viewer moves near the painting. The overall effect is of lines and regions of light flickering in and out and moving in the piece.

I was trying to get a “biological” feel, yet keep the idea of a network that could process bits and bytes of information. The dots are actually little spherical lenses. Different lens shapes pick up the light strongly at different conditions. The lenses also create light patterns within the painting.

Purchase original art by Valluzzi through Artvenue:

Neural network                Learning Circuit

Biology of an Idea  

Purchase an archival giclee of Neural Network through my FAA POD site.  Print page links (just click ‘em) for: Neural Network, Biology of an Idea, Orbits of Joy, Learning Circuit, Dendritic Echoes

Some detail images are in the gallery below.