Artist Jo Love came to talk to the MA group about her stunning pencil drawings of electron micrographes of dust. Are they pictures of dust? Or pictures of micrographes of dust? Based on her explanation, they are perhaps neither - clearly the pictures are based on the micrographes, and the dust particles are real (and weird to think they are somewhere in that sample, but probably impossible to locate again), but they are deliberately changed to remove the 'cold' light. Jo clearly understood that the images were not taken with light, and that is part of their unworldly quality, but it's also a clear that a lot of that 'coldness' comes down to a palette chosen for easy interpretation.
Nevertheless, it got me thinking again about the odd quality of images illuminated by 'light' that is not actually 'light'. Of course, a place such a 'light' is encountered again is in 3d rendering. The 'preview' image offered by 3d software like Blender uses an approximation designed to make the shape of the object easy to see, and to be fast to rendered interactively, but I often find it as beautiful as the finished renders, with the same strange quality that Jo sees in the micrographs:
More generally I think of the non-photorealistic rendering I do - I think perhaps people don't understand the lengths I go to (and perhaps fail!) to make things LOOK interesting, rather than be 'correct'. Again, the play of light is often heavily manipulated.
Building on the 'mark making' experiments I have been doing, I'd love to experiment with creating virtual 'sculptures' or 3d 'marks' and seek the same odd light that Jo renders so beautifully in her graphite drawings. A kind of gentle light of death? A stillness, not a horror.
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