Andrew: This was really my first portrait, my first serious portrait. I’ve done a few other portraits, but this was my first big attempt at a portrait. And for me, this portrait actually became the embodiment of an intersection of lives, of two lives particularly. I obviously have a realist style, but it’s very much based in the 17th century Baroque tradition, particularly focusing on the Dutch masters. I’m influenced by the Italian Baroque as well, but there’s something about the Dutch realist tradition which has a focus on naturalism, which I think reflects a burgeoning scientific view of the world of the time.
There’s a lot of things going on in the symbolism of the painting, too. These rotating, kind of globes, these circles that gravitate around the sitter; one of them is a convex mirror, and it contains a reflection of the room of the space in which this occurs, so that it also operates as an analogy for the world and all that’s contained within it. Pretty much like Carl Sagan’s Blue Dot photograph of the Earth as Voyager leaves the Solar system, and looks back at the earth; and everything that occurs, every battle, every disagreement, every ... all the love that ever occurred in human history all occurred on that tiny little blue dot, and it’s all contained within that.And I wanted to capture something of that astronomical feel within that convex mirror.
The colour that I chose for the telescope was made easier by the fact that a lot of the machinery is coloured exactly this kind of blue, and it’s a really beautiful colour. And it fit the portrait beautifully. For me, the historical perspective in this portrait was important because I wanted us to look at the broad picture of what we’re doing, environmentally. Because we’re looking at only fairly short lifetimes where we often don’t notice the change, very dramatic change in the environment over our lifetimes, because it’s geologically not a significant bit of time at all. But over a few hundred years, we get quite a different snapshot of what happens, and I think because I’m so interested in history, anyway, and often looking back to the past as a reference point; for an artist I think it’s very natural to be concerned about the changes, moreso than people who are very focused on the contemporary. And I think scientists also have that long-term view, moreso if they’re looking into the cosmos, because they’re getting that really amazingly long picture of the development of time and life.
So that sense of history, I really wanted to embed that into the painting.
