Portrait

I'm partnering with Jairo Velasquez and I have just put together my final piece. I wanted to sum up some of the different work that is going on and my reaction to it. It's sort of a portrait. So this one, although still very abstract has a narrative thread, so I think his team may recognize some of the themes in it. I thought I'd give some photos to show how the work progressed.

I'm a painter and I use a color copy transfer technique, so I can incorporate equations, diagrams and images if I have a digital image of them. Anything with writing on them has to be flipped backwards if I want it to be readable.

Here I am laying out different patterns of hexagonal lattices that represent the physical structure of graphene.

transfering some shapes

Now I am adding a central motif--a graphene bilayer--two atom layers thick but at a slight angle. It was inspired by a suggestion by someone on Jairo Velasquez's team when we discussed on the discovery that two layers of graphene at a magic angle around 1.1 to 1.5 degree have superconducting properties.

I'm adding a whole lot of details, the time independent Schrödinger equation and the Dirac relativistic equation for the free electron (guys, gals correct me if I got this wrong), a diagram of the preparation of a sample for a scanning tunneling electron microscope and some of the equipment.

I thought the Schrödinger would be most recognizable so I slipped it in to the wave ripples in the lower left. Dirac, I moved while scanning it, so it sort of flits in and out above the orange and magenta lattices.

It's still pretty rough at this point but it has the main subject matter, and from an artistic standpoint the composition is finally set up.

After a couple of weeks of tweaking I was done, and it looks like this:

"Graphene Novel"