Original artwork description:

Named after John Galt, the main hero of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, 'Galt' painting is part of the Patterns Of Stardust series.

Reading about how 40,000 tons of Cosmic Dust falling to Earth each year affects us, how it becomes part of the ecosystem that is our body and knowing that each of us carries elements made in the furnaces of stars made me think of the place of a person in the scale of the Universe and of Randian characters, exemplifying ethical egoism and self-determination, morally heroic and heroically rational, proud to be alive, to be human, to be part of the world.

A strong and beautiful human body became a natural progression to the series. We are all made of stardust, we are unbreakable, if we choose to be.

Series draws inspiration from the scientific study of meteorites, interstellar dust and presolar grains exploring our interconnectedness with the universe (not in the metaphysical sense but through actual physical matter).

The two books that provided food for though and initial visual inspiration were Living With the Stars: How the Human Body Is Connected to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Planets, and the Stars, written by astrophysicist Karel Schrijver, a senior fellow at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, and his wife, Iris Schrijver, professor of pathology at Stanford University, and Meteorites by Caroline Smith, Sara Russell and Gretchen Benedix published by Natural History Museum. Photographic images of thin sections of the meteorites under cross-polarised light showing their complex mineral and crystal composition provide the point of departure for the abstract canvases (or in this case the background) that are in fact firmly routed in the natural world around us.

Materials used:

acrylic and inc on canvas

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