New oilpainting, definitely not a portrait. But is it even figurative?
I started with the idea of making a ‘quick’ painting of ‘the’ Universe‘.
(Did you know that the catholics burnt someone -who absolutely believed in Jesus etc- at the stake for suggesting there was more than one universe?)
Astronomist nowadays are quite sure the Universe contains many galaxies that each and everyone contains many, many solar systems. So at least my image had to depict more than one galaxy. In this context our neighbour is the Andromeda Galaxy. Looking for some reference depictions I found a nice one.
I found a nice one; It was covered with watermarks. So it was an advertisement for beautiful poster-size images of this part of our universe. But who was actually the creator?
Or to put it another way: of course, there was absolutely no question here of a skillful photographer who happened to be around with his or her spaceship by accident or on purpose!
There is definitely nothing here that remotely resembles a photograph!
A truly phenomenal amount of data was collected and a great deal of knowledge and effort was invested to produce this impression. Many people have contributed to produce this image that could theoretically be directly perceived and photographed by a human being.
But actually?
It is completely unverifiable.
Not now and not ever! Absolutely not.
Somehow this considerations inspired me to include an ‘advertisement’ for this website in my painting!
The name seems to be devoured by a black hole ….
PS: I made a hyperslapse of part of the painting process, titled ‘The Andromeda Galaxy, Evil and Politics’).
PPS: The painting has a first layer in acryl, other layers are in (fast drying) alkyd oilpaint. Unlike my portraits it is made on a traditional canvas. 60 x 40 cm)