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
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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