Portraits of Famous Scientists, 2018

Portraits of Famous Scientists are abstract portraits of individuals who contributed in major ways to scientific knowledge. Stephen Hawking’s abstraction pivots about and succumbs to a black hole. Rosalind Franklin’s representation imagines the axis of a DNA double helix; her X-ray diffraction image led Watson and Crick to their 1963 Nobel Prize. How unjust that Franklin, with her early death in 1958, was left out of this quintessential recognition! Aficionados of the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2 = c2) will find Pythagoras' triangles within his abstraction. And, of course, I could not leave out the inventor of the rainbow, Roy G Biv!

The rest are subject to and limited only by your imagination.

So, how were Portraits photographed? Without giving away the answer, I refer you to the biography of Jules Antoine Lissajous (1822-1880): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Antoine_Lissajous. Also, see his portrait and the About section of this website.

Indeed, Portraits are photographs, initially B&W images. Color has been added to enhance the abstractions. Through the addition of color, I’ve moved away from products of Lissajous’ physics to light paintings as abstract art.

The originals are 40x40 inch glossy color photographs mounted on aluminum composite material (“ACM”) and protected with a 3-mil laminate.

Click on the thumbnails to see the full images.