Sympathetic Fire

Some say fire has no sympathy, but then again there is a fire burning inside of us every day. Food becomes power and heat through chemical reactions, the nervous system passes kinetic energy from brain to body, and blood pumps constantly. Studying and teaching physiology has taught me many of the details of how it all works, and I pass the knowledge along to students. In this painting I tried to convey the message of inner fire and organic energy using abstract shapes and flowing structures. Hopefully I pass along some ideas to the art fans out there.

While this is only a small painting, there was considerable detail and technique that went into it. The drawing has three layers superimposed on each other. The foreground has seven objects each with a different colour arranged from top right to bottom left. The middle layer has the abstract flames going from bottom right to top left, and the back layer has the viscera-inspired undulations that represent internal structure. The background was done by paining red and orange shapes and then overlaying the red with green, and the orange with blue-green. One interesting thing, I also saved this picture as a text file just for fun,  and it got translated into a huge grid of numbers. I'll paste a bit of it below, kind of interesting to see wild creativity boiled into a bunch of dry numbers. Art meets Science.

8 x 10" cold press watercolour, March 2017


Bottom part of the painting converted into numbers!!
131.000    123.333    108.333    106.000    111.333    113.333    111.000    102.000    110.000    123.333    116.000    103.333    100.000    90.000    91.000    95.000    92.333    85.667    87.667    87.333    82.000    79.000    81.333    92.333    90.333    82.000    77.000    79.000    83.000    81.000    77.000    74.333    73.333    76.000    74.000    70.667    78.333    76.333    76.000    73.667    77.333    76.333    69.667    70.667    68.333    68.667    70.667    68.667    72.667    70.667    68.333    71.000    69.333    70.000    70.333    69.000    69.333    72.333    74.667    74.667    71.333    71.000    71.667    70.333    67.667    70.667    72.000    70.667    69.333    69.333    71.667    72.000    69.000    68.667    69.000    69.667    71.000    72.000    69.667    68.667    71.000    71.667    68.667    69.000    71.333    73.333    76.000    72.333    73.333    74.667    77.333    73.667    70.333    71.667    74.000    74.667    73.000    72.667    69.667    71.667    72.000    71.667    71.333    72.333    71.000    72.333    74.000    72.667    73.667    75.000    76.667    77.333    76.667    78.667    78.667    79.333    80.333    81.000    79.333    78.667    79.000    79.667    80.667    78.667    79.000    79.000    80.000    82.000    86.000    85.333    85.000    83.333    82.000    82.667    82.333    82.333    83.333    84.667    91.667    89.333    87.667    86.667    84.667    87.333    89.333    93.333    94.333    89.000    87.667    93.000    95.667    95.000    94.667    95.000    97.333    97.667    97.333    98.667    96.333    96.667    98.667    100.000    101.000    102.333    103.333    104.333    105.333    104.667    107.667    109.333    111.333    113.000    114.667    114.000    113.667    115.667    117.333    119.000    121.000    122.333    123.000    124.000    124.333    126.333    129.000    133.000    134.333    133.333    134.000    135.000    136.000    137.333    139.000    139.000    139.333    141.333    144.000    145.667    146.000