The ART Approach is a technique in dentistry that uses simple tools and materials to repair teeth quickly, and I spent three years of my PhD researching new materials for it. ART stands for Atraumatic Restorative Technique, and the coincidence in the name was too good to pass up, so I decided to apply the ART approach to art – smaller paintings and simpler materials, but hopefully just as beautiful and interesting.
Once a week, every week, for most of a year I added a new painting, with subjects ranging from fairly traditional landscapes and abstracts to some things straight out of the research lab. The result is an interesting collection of paintings full of experiments and surprises; not many painters can use an electron microscope to look for inspiration so there’s sure to be something you haven’t seen before!
Rocket science isn’t all that complicated; Newton pretty much covered it in four laws, and you can do it at home with half a bottle of water and a bicycle pump. The difference between that and the landing on the Moon is rocket engineering… now that can get a bit tricky.
A quick stroll under the trees on a sunny day.
With so many paintings of Ireland’s coastline it would be wrong not to include something local. This is Dodd’s Rock, looking towards Courtown.
A view from the shade of the trees on Stephen’s Green. I don’t often paint buildings, or even straight lines for that matter. But this whole this is about experimenting, so I even used a ruler for this one.
The countdown has begun, only ten paintings left to go. Its not long now until The ART Approach goes the way of the space shuttle. I won’t hold it against you if you didn’t realise this was a space shuttle, I’ve never been one to let realism get in the way of a nice stroke of paint.
If you have any interest in sci-fi you’re bound to have come across nanobots at some point: swarms of tiny machines that are invisible individually but come together in huge clouds to take on the shape of various objects or people. Sci-fi has predicted them for decades, and science edges closer and closer to catching up…but nature got there a long time ago. Inside our bodies are motors, pumps, springs, and levers made of just a handful of atoms. There are things that walk, climb, and swim around our bodies building and maintaining them. These are dwarfed by the huge factories that create them: the 10000000000000 or so cells in the average human body. We are the original nanobots.
If you keep seeing the same patterns appearing no matter how close you look at something, then it’s fractal. Like mountains, which look a lot like the rocks they’re covered in. Or trees, where each branch looks like a smaller tree with lots of even smaller trees sticking out of it, and even the leaves have their own tree pattern. Or a lake-shore, where the water finds smaller and smaller gaps to flow into, right down to microscopic cracks that look like giant valley’s if you look close enough. Fractals have some interesting properties, like having somewhere between 2 and 3 dimensions, or having infinite length and zero area.
White is very fashionable these days. Tip: it gets a lot more interesting if you run it through a shower of rain.
Have you ever seen a an arrow flying in slow motion? They accelerate so fast that they are compressed and then spring back as if they are swimming. If they didn’t bend like this, they wouldn’t be able to go in a straight line.
The Gap of Dunloe celebrating Paddy’s day with a bit of drizzle. Very Irish.
