For the past three years I have been working on 100 Painting of Plankton. As of yesterday, I am up to number eighty-six. I feel close to acheiving something.
My initial plan was to make one hundred square paintings on panels. Maybe some multi-panel paintings. I would figure it out as things progressed. I began working from videos I found online and from photographs of foraminiferans taken by a professor from marine science grad school in Mississippi.
I wanted my own photographs to work from, so I started keeping Puget Sound plankton samples that I collected on ocean teaching cruises. I begged favors from scientist friends at the University of Washington so I could bring my plankton in to the ocean teaching labs. They have to be photographed under a Zeiss light microscope and are at their most photogenic while still alive. I also photographed any living plankton I could get from other scientists going on research cruises.
Plankton 81 Graceful copepod appendages
The watercolors began as preliminary sketches for larger paintings, then took on a life of their own. I love their diverse morphology, and the negative spaces between aggregations of organisms. Wet on wet watercolor application gives the paintings a flowing watery quality that evokes marine organisms in their own environment.
And, I love the format of making 4” x 4” square paintings of one thing. I feel like one hundred paintings are enough to begin to explore the format. It’s like a visual version of a haiku.