Diary Of An Artist In A New World

Stargazing

Tonight Saturn is so very bright and strongly yellow in the northern sky. I don't remember it being so bright before. In the city I don't use a telescope in recent years. I cannot escape bright street lights at the studio. Years ago when Pablo was young and Leif was an infant we put together a 6 inch reflecting telescope. I painted Johansen & Sons on the tube. That was in Cairns. I remember the first time we saw Saturn in the telescope. We found it low in the eastern sky. It was the strangest sight. The rings were nearly edge on and it looked like a ball with a nail through it.

Review Of In The Shadow Of The Moon: Pure Brilliance

There are certain events that etch so deeply in the memory that years later we can remember every detail of our surroundings and thoughts as we heard the news. 9/11 is like that for me, as was the deaths of John Lennon and Elvis Presley. High on my list of memorable events, however is one that is not about death. It is the positive and inspirational moment of those first steps on the moon.

Other people saw it on television. Our school, being in a provincial town, had no TV and the radio broadcast was piped through the school PA system. No doubt by a secretary holding the mike up to a transistor radio. It sounded like it - screechy and indistinct, but in the middle of that chaos of squawky noise one of the greatest moments in the history of humankind was discernible. A man was stepping onto another world for the first time.

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a newly released movie that brings that experience to life again by piecing together previously unseen footage from the NASA archives and digitally enhancing the original. Previously seen film from the control room, for example, was silent. The makers of In The Shadow Of The Moon spliced together audio tapes from the control room and using the same techniques musicians use to lip sync music, they put the voice back into the moving lips as the drama unfolds.

Likewise the footage shot by the astronauts in orbit and on the moon is brought to life by the addition of an audio track. In this case it is the astronauts themselves describing what was going on from their perspective as human beings looking back to events they can never forget.

Michael Collins the astronaut who stayed in the lunar orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon, and for a while became the most isolated human being in history, has revealing insights and  remarkable observations that turn something that could easily be the dry ramblings of a pilot into the exciting human story that this great adventure was. After all the millions of dollars spent, and the incredible machinery put to work (Apollo Five is still the most powerful rocket ever made), it is in the end a story of the courage and adventurous spirit of some visionary people that made the lunar landing possible.

It seems incredible some of the risks that were taken. It should not be forgotten that the effort to get to the moon was at the cost of precious human lives. The movie reveals in the astronauts own words their own fears surrounding certain exposed wiring in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the space capsule. These fears were proved real when the 3 astronauts of Apollo One were burned to death on the launchpad. It appears they were fearful of the wiring, but more fearful of complaining due to the risk of losing their place as astronauts on the project.

The production notes for the movie demonstrate the extraordinary steps the producers took to recreate these awesome events and the sensitivity they exercised as the project developed:

"Producer Duncan Copp and co-producer Chris Riley spent many weeks in the NASA film library examining cans of film - some of which had not been opened for over 30 years. This search uncovered many gems, including astonishing space shots which have been re-mastered from the original film rolls to reveal the Apollo program with a visual clarity and impact it has never had before. The mute 16mm rolls shot in Mission Control have been laboriously lip-synced with the 16-track audio recordings of the mission controllers' voice loop to re-unite the pictures and sound of many historic moments for the first time, lending a striking immediacy to many dramatic scenes.

"The film has some stunning shots in space of the spacecraft separating and docking. This was engineering footage shot so that the engineers could investigate the cause of any problems – in effect a sort of visual "black box recorder". There were cameras built into the various stages of the Saturn V rocket which would automatically shoot key moments, usually at high frame rates on 16mm film. The cameras would then eject (you can see this happening on one particularly spectacular shot of the final stage firing) and re-enter the atmosphere, where they would be caught in mid-air by high-flying aircraft equipped with nets! It's an amazing story we plan to tell in one of the DVD featurettes. One of things we wanted to do was really allow the audience to luxuriate in this amazing footage – and so some shots we play in their entirety."

"Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me about this project is that this film had not already been made," said director David Sington. He then went on to describe the surviving astronauts who were able to participate in the film. "The best thing about it has been meeting and talking to ten of the most remarkable individuals I have ever met."

This movie has enough blasting rockets to please hardened technophiles, enough tales of courage to please the adventurous, and enough heart and soul to please the rest of us.

Ron Howard Presents In The Shadow Of The Moon
Blasting off September 2007
Website / Preview of In The Shadow Of The Moon

Eclipse Of The Moon

Tonight art class went downstairs into William Street to watch the moon entering totality. It was Simon, our model who reminded us that it was time. Thank you, Simon. Even here in the center of the city where so much city light washes out the color it still looked magnificent as the last small sliver of sunlight left the moon's surface. Ashlea pointed out how everyone else in the street seemed oblivious to the marvel in the sky. They were missing the most gorgeous sight. This is the sort of thing to make me glad to be alive.

Yuk! Pink's A Girls Color

It's official, girls really do have a preference for pink, and boys? - they've been proved to have a case of the blues.

For years we've been told that gender color differences are cultural, that it is learned behavior, that gender neutral toys and time would rid society of this pernicious inequality. Girls don't really like pink, they are taught to like it by a paternalistic society, despite the evidence every parent sees, that their children seem to be born with inbuilt personalities and preferences. In the same family there can be two girls with the same education and influences yet one can be a tomboy who hates pink, the other can love her Barbie doll and only want to dress in pink.

And boys are pretty consistent in thinking three things are Yuk! Girls, the color pink, and kissing girls. All except for that small portion who seem to prefer feminine things. But any number of screwed up adult trans-gender people will tell you that while their boyhood preference for feminine things including colors was frowned on, and strongly discouraged, it could never be extinguished.

Researchers Anya Hurlbert and colleagues at the University of Newcastle in the UK appeared to be sympathetic to the nurture rather than nature theory at the beginning of their testing as they admitted they were looking for cultural differences in color preferences by studying two culturally diverse groups. One consisted of exclusively British adults and the other were Han Chinese.

They were surprised to find that there was little differences between the groups, but marked differences between genders in both groups.

The study showed that both males and females have a strong liking for blue. It has been suggested that human prehistory may account for this. The color blue is associated with clear skies and clean water, both important components in the survival of early humans.

The study also revealed that only the females had a strong preference for another color - red, and particularly light reds and pinks. This could possibly be explained if early human females became gatherers of fruits, red being a very common indicator of ripening fruit.

This color preference was also found in the types of blue that females preferred to the males. Men seemed to choose pure blues when given a choice, but the women chose reddish blues such as lilac before the pure blues.

Evolutionary pressures in early humans due to behavior is highly likely to be a major factor for the reason for these color preferences. Few mammals have sophisticated color vision. Most mammals have only two receptors in their eye for two different wavelengths. This means that most mammals confuse many colors, much like a colorblind person does. Only the highest primates like humans and gorillas have a third wavelength receptor. That means that we and other apes can distinguish a full range of colors. Evolution selects for traits that offer a survival advantage. That includes the ability to better distinguish between ripe and unripe fruits as primates need to. Flowers too are an indicator of maturing plants of all kinds. It seems no coincidence that reds, pinks and lilacs are very common colors for flowers.

So, as you choose your colors for a painting pause for a minute and consider the colors you are using. Some of the choices may well be due to the needs of the moment, but some of them may well be rooted in the activities of your ancestors in an African Savannah a quarter of a million years ago.

There is another aspect to this. Knowing the deep psychological connection between color and the human psyche enables an artist to create a heightened emotional effect from their artwork. Knowledge of the differences in gender responses to color enables an even more finely tuned use of color to evoke response.

Beam Me Up Scottie (Well, Soon, Maybe)

Not to be outdone by a 22 room space hotel announced a few days ago (see my post "The First Artist In Space" August 12, 2007), Brigelow Aerospace has brought forward its plans to launch its own space station called Sundancer. Although not described specifically as a space hotel that would seem to be the most likely source of income for the venture.

Brigelow has already launched two inflatable test orbiting space ships called Genesis One and Two. Sundancer appears to be planned for launch before 2010. So it seems there is going to be ample opportunity to become the first artist in space. Now all I need is the four million dollars or so to get up there. Maybe I will just have to Hitchhike. Have thumb, will travel...

The First Artist In Space

From my earliest memories I dreamed of being the first artist in space. While Bill Gates dreamed of money, Murdoch of world domination, Steve Jobs of beautiful machines, and George W. of the mother of all oil wells, I was lost somewhere on the moon painting moonscapes or on a starship photographing the center of the galaxy.

Even today, when other people count sheep to get themselves to sleep, I take my seat in a spacecraft amongst the moons of Jupiter. I have to confess that I have only ever used two screen savers. One was a view from the space station of the earth, and the current one is a photograph of Jupiter taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1995.

There are few things possible to imagine of greater beauty than the cloud tops of Jupiter or the rings of Saturn. I check the web sites for the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Mars rovers every few days to see the latest photos. Currently there is an image of one of Saturn's moons called Encaladus on the Cassini site. Encaladus looks like the most beautiful pearl in existence.

I dream of being in a little compartment on Cassini taking photographs and making drawings and paintings on my Wacom tablet and trusty Macintosh. I could paint the beauty of space, and then in pictures and poems try to explore the loneliness of being out there, in the middle of the inky blackness with a limited supply of resources. It would be worth it to know that I only had a few weeks of air left if I could just communicate some of that feeling I get from extraordinary beauty.

I remember the first time I saw Saturn. It was in a 4 inch reflecting telescope I had put together from old parts as a project with my young sons. It was in Cairns on a warm evening that we took the telescope outside and after looking at the moons of Jupiter we spotted Saturn low in the eastern sky. That year the rings were nearly side on to the Earth and the planet looked like a yellow ball with a long yellow nail through it. It was the strangest sight, and even now it remains my best ever view of this wonderful sight.

I would love to be the first artist in space. and have a bohemian studio amongst the stars.

If I end up with four million dollars it is still possible to be the first space bohemian. Today it was announced that the first Space Hotel is planned for launch starting in 2012. The rooms are 22 pods around a central hub. It is the strangest looking thing, like a sea creature and proof that reality is always stranger than fiction. When science fiction imagined space stations years ago they visualized wheels in space. Maybe that will happen one day, but so far the space station we have, and now this space hotel are nothing like the future world predicted not long ago.

I would love to be a guest on the Space Hotel in my Galactic Suite painting the marvelous view of the Earth below and its extraordinary beauty like a jewel in space.

Farewell To Pluto

This was the week when I finally came to accept the reclassification of Pluto as no longer being a true planet. I heard an interview with an astronomer (I can't remember if it was on radio or in a podcast) in which he was pointing out the clear difference in characteristics between the 8 major planets and every other object in the solar system, including of course, Pluto.

It is a series of characteristics including size, and the way they interact with their orbital environment. Pluto clearly has more in common with Asteroids and Kuiper belt objects than it does with the major planets.

For a long time I had viewed the late move to declassify Pluto as political maneuvering and preferred the definition of a planet as being the ability of an object to form itself gravitationally into a spherical shape. The interview plus this weeks announcement of an accurate size for Eris, another Kuiper Belt object in the vicinity of Pluto. Eris has been shown to be 27% larger than Pluto. It kind of makes Pluto seem that little bit less significant.

I remember as a kid that Pluto's size was still only a guess, with some estimates giving it a diameter almost half that of the Earth. It was easier to accept it as a planet then. Size does count. Of course over the years Pluto's known size gradually reduced, first with the discovery of Charon, Pluto's moon. Increasingly accurate measurements of Pluto's size lead to the realization that it is quite small after all. It is smaller than some moons in the solar system, and as it turns out, smaller than at least one other ice world in the outer solar system.

So, Pluto, farewell as a planet, I didn't let you go lightly.

The image shows Pluto and it's largest moon, Charon.