ART WORK

Life Models

By Douglas Repetto

ARTISTS’ STUDIOS HAVE TRADITIONALLY manual techniques to sculpt the pieces, often work-been full of reference materials like botanical ing from photographs or illustrations in books. drawings, medical texts, photographs, cata- But recently he’s also been using images from logs, and images clipped from magazines. Artists online science resources, like the PalDat palyno-use these images as direct models for realistic logical (the study of pollen and spores) database, renderings, but they often provide indirect inspira- which is where he found high-resolution electron tion as well; patterns in a botanical drawing might microscope images that he used to create the giant end up as abstract gestures in a painting, or shapes pollen grains. The site has a graphical search fea-from a tool catalog might inspire sculptural forms. ture that made it easy for a nonexpert to navigate Just as often, reference materials simply set the the huge variety of images by searching for the mood or tone in the studio; being surrounded by sorts of shapes and textures he was interested in. meaningful materials is an inspiration in itself. I Russell told me, “One of the reasons I enjoy work-recently visited the reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s ing from life is that nature comes up with textures home studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, and and forms that I just wouldn’t ever imagine myself, was overwhelmed by the density and intensity of or think I could produce myself. When I saw the the materials (books, magazines, clothing, painting pollen images, my first reaction was that they would supplies, canvases) jumbled across every surface in be impossible to reproduce in clay. Then my mind the room. Although Bacon didn’t often use images began to figure out production techniques, over from these sources directly in his paintings, he was time, while I was in the shower or walking, or driving. certainly inspired by having them around. He said: At some point I thought, ‘I should give it a try,’ and “I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos ten days later I had a ball covered in spines.” suggests images to me.” Interestingly, the rest of Russell is using traditional techniques to create his small home was rather tidy and uncluttered; the objects based on very contemporary sources — chaos of his studio seemed a conscious technique, electron microscopes have only been around for a key part of his process as a painter. 70 years or so, and the PalDat website went live in In addition to a studio littered with reference 2005. Before electron microscopes, we didn’t really debris, many artists now also look to the seemingly know in detail what pollen grains looked like, and unlimited resources of the internet: image searches, before the internet, getting access to scientific video sharing sites, scientific and historical databases, images was often an arduous and expensive and so on. Their studios might still be chaotic, but proposition. PalDat is free for noncommercial use now their computer desktops are as well. (although many scientific resources, particularly peer-

Ceramics artist Christopher Russell has been reviewed journals, are still notoriously expensive). working on a series of hyperdetailed, incredibly Caitlin Berrigan’s recent Viral Confections project lifelike (especially given the fact that they’re mono- takes a similar approach to gathering source data, chromatic!) bee sculptures, including intricate but her method of translating 3D data to a physical sections of beehives, bees on flowers, their little object uses more contemporary techniques. While legs laden with pollen, and large blowups of grains reading about similarities between the structure of of pollen. He mostly uses traditional, labor-intensive some viruses and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic

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