Revisions and Iterations

I’ve given a lot of thought lately to hindsight: if you could go back 20 years (30? 40?) and change things, would you? Should you? Would you make the same choices again, or “fix” things? And what would be lost in the correction of those mistakes?

I know this is an art newsletter and all, but to give a bit of context to the amount of “space” in my art, you need to know that one of the most impactful summers of my life was my undergrad internship at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Clear Lake, TX, next-door to Johnson Space Center. It was 1999, Smashmouth’s “All-Star” was all over the radio, and I spent an amazing ten weeks (ten HUMID HOT weeks, OMG so humid) working with remote sensing Moon data from the Clementine mission.

My advisor was a snarky (but also encouraging and kind) scientist, Dr. Paul Spudis. He tried a few times to discourage me from continuing on in lunar studies, I think (in hindsight) as a bit of reverse psychology, but also perhaps because I wanted so badly to go to the Moon, and in 1999 that just wasn’t on the horizon. So instead I counted craters to date lava flows and processed data to make false color iron and titanium maps of Mare Nubium. If you’ve never seen false-color imaging, here’s an example (from Clementine, but not my processing1):

Images like the above can show areas of iron concentration (the “mare” or dark areas) versus the iron-poor “highlands” (light areas). Unfortunately, a few years after my internship, the formulas and calculations I used to process Clementine data into maps were shown to be flawed, and most of my research from that summer went into the bin. (Such is science. I still have a scientific publication2 to my name though!)

Anyway. I’ve been thinking about the meandering path of my career(s) and life, and contemplating going back to school in the future, and all of this made me wonder what cranky ol’ Paul was up to these days… and today I discovered his passing in 2018. Ouch. I wish he could have seen the success of Artemis I last November. I wish I could go up to him at the next Lunar & Planetary Science Conference and shake his hand and say, hey, it took me 20 years but I pulled myself together!! 

Which brings me back to the start of this newsletter. Would I go back and make different choices in college? If I did, would I still be married to the wrong person? Would I have never met my wonderful husband, my dearest friends? Would I have gotten that colonoscopy in 2019 that led to my cancer diagnosis? (Would it have been stage 4, instead of stage 2?) Would I have been there, 18 months ago, to hold my dying father’s hand in the ICU? Who knows?

At some point you have to let go of the past and mistakes you’ve made (real or perceived) and live your life, for good or bad. And the answer is no, I wouldn’t go back.

Back to art. I finished another Starship painting (this would be #2 of 5 in progress):

In case you’re (still) following along, this is the “letting work be” and “getting out of your own way” part of the program. This piece had a mind of its own. I started it thinking it would be a stark-white background with a more simple rocket and exhaust clouds. Instead it became more detailed, and incorporated both a metallic, Art Nouveau-esque border, and an intricate hand-inked background (yes you read that right—I made guidelines in pencil with a compass, but those lines were hand-drawn.) I questioned my decisions from beginning to end, but as I let go and let the piece be what it wanted to be, it coalesced into something new. I’d had an idea months ago to do a series of rockets with an Art Nouveau/Russian iconography/illuminated manuscript twist, and this became the first of those. (Come up with THAT on your own, AI!) A fellow IAAA artist remarked that it could be a stained glass window in a church on Mars; I am 100% behind this idea.

In other news, I’m excited to attend the Making Space workshop in Pasadena in July, learning about Europa and icy/ocean worlds from JPL scientists and scientist-artists, three days of science and art! (My two favorite things!)

I remain one of the nerdiest people you know… but hey, have you ever found a 50-pound double thunderegg/geode? Because I have, so there. (This past weekend, outside Madras, Oregon. Took me two hours to dig it out. Here it is, cleaned.)

Enjoy your day, and happy Wednesday!