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Rebecca Kamen, NeuroCantos , an installation at Greater Reston Arts Center  Six years ago, The Elemental Garden , an exhibition at Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE) prompted me to start blogging about art. Like TED talks, the news of something so visually fascinating and mentally stimulating as Rebecca Kamen's integration of art with sciences needs to spread.  GRACE presented her work in 2009 and did a followup exhibition, Continuum , which closed February 13, 2016. Rebecca Kamen, Lobe , Digital print of silkscreen, 15" x 22" Like the Elemental Garden , Kamen's new works visually evoke and replicate scientific principles.  For the non-scientist and the scientist, the works and their presentation are fascinating.  Kamen worked with a British poet and a composer/musician from Portland, Oregon, each with similar intellectual interests. Two prints included in the show create a dialogue between her design and the words of poet Steven Fowler. I like how the idea of gray m...

The Hyperbolic Coral Reef project has spread around the globe Nature is mysterious and some of the magical colors and patterns of the coral reef are a wonder of nature's artistry. Surprisingly, vegetables such as kale, frissée and other lettuces mimic the free-flowing, wild patterns found in the coral reef.  These products of nature form hyperbolic planes, not explained by Euclidean Geometry.  Crochet, a fiber art that traditionally has utilitarian purpose, holds the power to make this mystery visible to our eyes.  With this in mind, various hyperbolic coral reef projects have sprung up around the globe, bringing together crochet artists to call attention to the fact that this natural wonder -- something akin to the oceans' natural forest -- is vastly disappearing as a result of pollution, human waste and climate change. Photo of satellite reef, Föhr, Germany, courtesy Uta Lenk The Hyperbolic Coral Reef Project is the brainstorm of Margaret and Christine Wertheim, ...

Rosamond Purcell, Field of the Cloth of Gold , 2010 A group of pictures in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition this past fall, Very Like A Whale, fooled me.   I thought artist Rosamond Purcell’s medium was some inventive watercolor, ink or acrylic technique.   Was the room too dark, or are my eyes are going bad?   To my surprise these pictures were photographs! It was an imaginative way to portray Shakespeare, and artist whose myriads of visions who give us such a breadth of humanity.   Very Like a Whale took its exhibition name from a quote in Hamlet showing the human ability of interpreting single objects in multiple ways.   (Hamlet and Polonius saw different images in the same cloud.) Purcell curated the show, along with Shakespeare scholar and Folger Director Michael Witmore. This pair also collaborated on a book , Landscapes of the Passing Strange , using her photographic images with evocative quotations from Shakespeare. This great review is b...

"Vertumnus," 1590, is a portrait of a Habsburg ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Arcimboldo betrays a knowledge of plants from the New World: corn and pumpkins. This painting may suggest Rudolf II's worldliness and the bounty of his reign. In the tradition of L eonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer, 16th century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo used his artistic skills to record his knowledge of the animals, plants, birds and fish, and he combined the seemingly opposite disciplines of art and science in a unexp ected way. The National Gallery exhibition of his paintings is called Arcimboldo 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy. The paintings on display are primarily portraits. But instead of recognizable faces with traditional features, he composed his portrait heads of painted vegetables, fruits, flowers, fire, fowl, fish and frogs. His human beings are a rich composite of the natural world. Arcimboldo worked in Vienna as the court painter for the Holy Roman Emperor, first...