steven meyers: x-ray vision

Steven Meyers’s work is a perfect example of science as fine art. Using finely attuned x-rays, he exposes beautiful arrangements of plants like this one. His website can be found here. For more beautiful portfolios of science as art, visit Seed Magazine’s portfolios feature.

oskar kokoschka: tre croci

An early landscape by Oskar Kokoschka, the 20th century Viennese Expressionist best known for his affair with Alma Mahler (Gustav Mahler’s widow) and his tribute to her, The Tempest. He painted many portraits and a number of mythological scenes, but I personally am most fascinated by his landscapes.

the geostationary banana over texas

There is a group of crazy artists/scientists down in Texas working on a rather unique project: sending a giant banana into space (or, well, near-space altitudes, but shhh). The idea is to create a giant (300 meters long) banana-blimp out of bamboo and synthetic paper, fill it with helium, and float it around 30 to 50 kilometers over Texas for a month or so. They’ve got the design down; now all they need is some funding. Or, you know, 1.5 million dollars of funding.

Check out the GSBOT website here.

remedios varo: the creation of the birds

Remedios Varo was a Spanish-Mexican painter who lived from 1908 to 1963. She was heavily influenced by the surrealist movement, with which she became involved when she fled to Paris during the Spanish Civil War. She subsequently sought temporary refuge in Mexico but ended up living out her days there. Her work blends art and science in a way that has always attracted me. Take the time to take a good look at this painting, The Creation of the Birds — there’s a lot to see.

julie mehretu: looking back to a bright new future

Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian-American artist who works primarily in abstract cityscapes of massive scale. We have an exhibit of her work currently on display at the Williams College Museum of Art, where I work, and I encourage you strongly to check out some more of her art. It’s impressive stuff and plays a great deal off of themes of globalization and world events, as you can see in the piece above, Looking Back to a Bright New Future, which my museum’s director described as resembling “an exploded map of the world”.

“monet refuses the operation” by lisa mueller

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors; fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

- Lisa Mueller