Comets Write Their Poetry Across The Nighttime Sky.
Meteors and Phases of The Moon Follow Soon.
Orbits Ring: Predictability, Uncertainty, Eternity, Infinity and Surprise.

As children growing up where the Mississippi River meets the Wapsipinicon, our uncomplicated lives were absorbed in explorations of nature’s forms and functions. Within the confluence of challenging, zig-zag currents, days were often suspended in Channels of Alarm. Arresting Beauty All Around came to our psychological rescue and The Contemplative Life Emerged.

Vast amounts of unobstructed Space and Time were poured into our hands daily. Details in every dimension caught our attention. Indigo hues of Sky and River flooded the backgrounds of our experiences. Looking for Sputnik, or the Bomb to Fall, orbitingc omets, meteors and moon thrilled us when they came. Meanwhile, the river wrote aboutthe universe in streaks of gold leaf moonbeams.

Comets Halley, Kahotek, Hale Bopp, and more, swept within eyesight from planetary doorsteps in the 1990s. Inspired by events in real time, I painted their comings and goings many times. With brushes made of sable hairs and papers of cellulose fibers, hand-painted, miniature tributes honor these wonders using pigments of pre-historic indigo dye, white clay, hot cadmium, cold cobalt, 22k gold leaf and organic gum tree sap. Photographs of the paintings using medieval methods and materials translate from analogue to digital incarnating at the will of my imagination and 21st C. computer skills. The possibilities may actually be Infinite.

Reading recently published space physics research I learn that gold and other heavy metal elements used in my original paintings are by-products of collisions between Two Supernovas from The Long Ago and Far Away. Elemental Cosmic Freight hitchhikes within the comet’s icy core, released when these galactic visitors skid upon our atmosphere, warming near the sun. With our Magnificent, Gravitational Force we attract these treasures into our domain, reconstructing their material attributes into Forms of Visual and Material Wealth.

Notes from:
The Celestial Aesthetics of Wonder and The Cosmology of Everything
An Artist’s Version of History, Science, Time and Space, Nancy L. Purington