SciArt Magazine - All Issues December 2015 | Page 16

STRAIGHT TALK with Jody Rasch Jody Rasch is a New York–based artist who explores the duality of nature through scientifically influenced abstractions. Exploring both the seen and unseen, his paintings are otherworldly and atmospheric, having one foot in the material and one in the complexly unreal. He has been exhibiting for over 25 years, and is affiliated with the Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI) and The New York Academy of Sciences. By Danielle McCloskey Contributor DM: You have been creating artwork for over 25 years. What prompted you to start making science–based art? JR: When I first started painting I focused on developing my technique, learning about materials, and creating a feeling through my work. Initially I painted still lifes and landscapes. I was able to do a number of group shows and sell some of my work. I liked the feeling that I could express through the pieces but I felt something was lacking, the subject matter wasn’t rich enough and was limited in terms of what could be communicated. As a result, after a while the subject matter stopped appealing to me—it was too literal. I was attracted to the abstract expressionists and the fact that they were trying to paint ideas. I also was getting more interested in painters such as Kandinsky who combined art and spirituality. Kandinsky also included science–based themes in his work. I had a difficult time with pure abstraction, as it didn’t seem to have a strong foundation for me. This is where the combination of science and art appealed to me. I had always been interested in science, particularly physics. I was reading books on relativity and particle physics. Much of what is contained in this subject seems fantastical (such as the relativity of space and time, the fact that light can act both as a particle and wave). Physics was trying to answer the big questions on the nature of the universe. I wanted to find a way to represent these concepts in my art. The first images I used were of bubble chambers, where atoms were broken 16 down into sub–atomic particles, each with its own mass and charge, which make different paths in the bubble chamber. The patterns were beautiful, and if one didn’t know what the subject matter was, it would appear to be an abstract pattern. This was the bridge for me between pure abstraction and landscapes and still life painting. In addition, particle physics is what everything is made of. Communicating this through my work is what appealed to me, more so than just painting another tree. Gradually I moved from physics to capturing images from radio astronomy and finally to electron microscopic images from biology. The similarity among these disciplines was that I was painting patterns, from a cell pattern or the pattern from the non–visible radio frequencies of a neutron star. The images themselves seemed to be abstractions but were in fact representational. This is a key theme to my work: duality. Whether it’s the duality of the abstract image actually being representative of real life, the duality of a beautiful cell image that represents a deadly virus or disease, or the like. In addition to changing subject matter, I also started experimenting more with technique. I use a variety of techniques and media for relating my message, including oils, acrylic paint and ink, colored pencil, and pastels. Many of the works used my own variation of pointillism in their construction. Large paintings may use tiny brush strokes and many of the large drawings use small lines to build them up. In these works, the observer’s eye blends the colors and positive and negative shapes together. SciArt in America December 2015