Saturday, July 13, 2013

Optics and Perception- introduction


It has been past 6 months since I’ve ‘published’ anything on this blog and for good reason.  I have transitioned completely out of the art services industry in which I was scrapping by and am now conducting scientific research in the relatively new field of Adaptive Optics on the retina.

Adaptive Optics is not a new scientific technique, it’s been used in astronomy for many years but it is new in Retinal Research.  By using an infrared laser we can scan the retina and see the cone density and structure of the eye, my job is to acquire these scans but also to determine how the variety of images I take relate to the other imaging devices currently in use and confer with the Ophthalmologists and the device makers in how to improve and develop this technology in a diagnostic setting and the final interpretive analysis.

As an artist who has a hard science background, having studied biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in university before I took a break and switched to art the transition has actually been incredibly smooth and the job is, well fantastic.

One of the great pleasures has been meeting and talking with some of the top Ophthalmologists, neuro scientists and physicists in the field but more importantly are the exciting conversations that have ensued about perception and reality, language and reality and sometimes and not too infrequently metaphysics.

The perceptual consciousness of vision in hindsight has always been a strong theme in my work and looking back at some of my ‘gestural works’ I can see that the various lines that have come through my paintings are related to the blood vessels and nerve fiber nets in an odd way, although this is really applying a reading or interpretation after the fact, no fuzzy metaphysics here, just happy accident or coincidence. 

More to come- as I have written a few things in relation to Henri Art Magazine that I feel are pertinent counter points and additions.