one in five billion

Okay, I must admit - this topic really did make me ponder the little promise I made to myself about participating in *every* topic for Inspire Me Thursday. At first I had NO idea what I was going to do for this topic.

After a bit of thinking, I remembered and idea I had a while ago. Matt and I have a great book with photographs ranging from the microscopic level to pictures of outer space. A while ago I thought some of the pictures in the book would be a really good inspiration for abstract painting - many of the images are quite abstract already.

These paintings are not exact copies of the photographs (I wouldn’t be able to make an exact copy and wouldn’t want to anyway - then it wouldn’t really be my art) - they are inspired by the photographs.

Anyway, here goes…

This first painting is my interpretation of a magnified view of a liver cell. I think of all the paintings I have done for this topic so far, this is my favourite. I like the abstract nature of it - it could be a birds-eye view of a landscape, with red mountains and blue rivers.

This is my interpretation of a magnified view of blood vessels. When painting this I was struck by how similar they are to trees (I paint a lot of trees and found the technique to be very similar). The colour is blue because that’s the colour they were in the photo I was working from. I think it was a dye to make them show up for the picture. I think the colour is fantastic with the black background.

Couldn’t have all these magnified body parts without the most important one… the brain!  This one is a magnified human cerebellum.

The only one of my medical artworks that isn’t part of a human body - this is my interpretation of a magnified photograph of heat-loving bacteria.  They are called “extremophiles” because they life in such extreme environments, like volcanic hot springs.  I think I liked painting this one the most out of the all the paintings I did for this challenge.  I had to experiment a bit to get the texture I wanted for the background as well as the texture of the inside of the bacteria.

After feeling overwhelmed by the topic this week I’m amazed I was able to come up with so many different artworks for this challenge - there are a few more ideas I have up my sleeve along the same lines and I’m really glad I challenged myself to try something new.