Background

The inspiration for this project is fed by three enduring channels in my life: physics, drawing, and pedagogy. As an undergraduate I studied both fine art and astronomy, where I developed a practice of observational oil painting and drawing, alongside a foundation in math and physics. After graduating, I taught drawing and painting at the Community College of Philadelphia and Mural Arts Philadelphia. A persistent curiosity drove me to enroll in astrophysics courses as a post-baccalaureate student in New York, where I was able to fill in some gaps left by my undergraduate degree, and get exposure to graduate level study of astrophysics.Though I continued to progress in both disciplines, I struggled to find a meaningful point of convergence. It wasn’t until I moved to London for a master’s degree in fine art that I began to see a natural convergence take shape. I studied at UAL, where I was able to continue my painting practice and define for myself what it means to be an ‘observational painter’, while researching a relationship between visual art and physics. My work across drawing and painting is grounded in extended observation: I take measurements, compare tones, and build compositions through processes of erasure and layering. Increasingly, I understand these works not as representations of their subjects (windows, interiors, faces), but as records of my attempt to understand them. While researching I came across Heisenberg’s 1958 paper The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics in which he expressed a similar sentiment concerning the discipline of science: “Natural science always presupposes man, and we must become aware of the fact that, as Bohr has expressed it, we are not only spectators but also always participants on the stage of life”. He argues that the acceptance of quantum physics requires a phenomenological approach to physics: human understanding is baked in. A drawing, too, cannot separate itself from the subject or the artist. Another pivotal moment for me came in 2024, when I attended a lecture by Bob Coecke at the Royal Institution, where he presented a diagrammatic, picture-based approach to teaching quantum mechanics. While not fine art per se, his method pointed toward the potential of visual thinking to expand the conceptual tools of physics. I began to see that drawing could act dually as a tool for representation and method of reasoning. In my second year at UAL I began to experiment with this idea. I interviewed a number of PhD students, scientists, and artists, and had them draw from a few topics they were familiar with such as ‘uncertainty’, ‘porosity’ and ‘complexity’. The results were interesting, if a little disjointed. The artists were much more comfortable working abstractly, whereas the scientists tended to draw figuratively from their experimental apparatus or textbook diagrams. Something was lost in translation between what C.P. Snow famously called ‘The Two Cultures’ of the sciences and humanities. With a more robust education in visual language, I believe these scientists would have a better chance of expressing their intuitions.