Visual Metaphors of the Universe

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May 23

2013

by Thilina Heenatigala

by Jon Lomberg

Published: Thursday, May 23 2013 06:46

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Here is a group of paintings where I bind the Universe to familiar things in a way more poetic than literal. So much of space art has been focused on what a viewer might really see from, say, the surface of Mars. I became interested in showing what can never be photographed, only imagined. Inspired by real science, these visual metaphors have a different layer of meaning.

The Backbone of Night from COSMOS

The !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana describe the Milky Way as the "backbone of night".  In 1973 Carl Sagan asked me for a painting that he intended to use in an Astronomy 101 textbook he was planning to write. The textbook was never written, but the image appeared as the title graphic for an episode of the television series COSMOS.

The Great Chain of Being

A view of the Cosmos at many different scales. Atoms are linked to form protein molecules in the tail of an airborne bacteriophage virus. Other viruses are seen against the complex internal architecture of a single-celled diatom, carried across a meadow by a breeze from the sea. Insects and grasses of the meadow overlook an ocean horizon. The setting Sun will reveal stars and the pattern of  the Milky Way, our home galaxy. Other galaxies stretch far across the Universe.

A human plays guitar in the midst of the Cosmos, celebrating the great chain that links the very large to the very small, with our everyday reality in the middle. Even though we seldom realize it, we live our lives amid the atoms and galaxies.

Galactic Wave

Here I pay homage to the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) who created a famous woodcut of a giant wave with Mt. Fuji seen in the horizon/I reinterpret this image in an astronomical context, showing the disk of the galaxy like a cresting wave, with young stars spraying out from the wave. This concept illustrates astrophysicists’ “density-wave theory of spiral arms formation”. The galactic center can be seen in the background, in the position Mt. Fuji occupies in the woodcut.

Earthfish

I had completed a diving trip to the Red Sea and was living and painting in Jerusalem when I created this vision of the analogy between a fish in the ocean and our planet in space. Donald Goldsmith and Tobias Owen have used it on the cover of the textbook “The Search for Life In The Universe”, and was the logo for the International Bioastronomy Symposium held at the University of California in 1993.

Starflowers

Glowing gas clouds called nebulae, envisioned as flowers against a dark tracery of dust.  Young stars grow in these nebulae and burst free, like seeds spreading through the galaxy. Eventually the stars release much of their constituent gasses back into space, to form a new generation of starflowers. I painted this in 1981 and it is the germ of the idea that led to my Galaxy Garden www.galaxygarden.net

Starseeds

Young stars bursting forth from a nebula, like seeds spreading through galaxy, seeds that may someday become oases of life.

Interstellar Communications as a Genetic Activity

Carl Sagan called this painting "DNA Embraces the planets." Either way, it is an artist's vision of the complex relationship between molecules, planets, and life.