Watching the Skies

Science has lengthy fascinated abstract artist Dorothea Rockburne A new show of drawings followed her exploration of astronomical themes above the last decade.

In 1991 while Dorothea Rockburne was in residence at the American Academy in Rome an incident occurred that made a lasting impression upon the artist. During a visit to a 17th-century villa, which, mysteriously, she has not ever been able to locate again, Rockburne came on a room ornamented by a breathtaking fresco of the skies, of the planets and their orbits, constellations, stars. Looking at this celestial diagram, she heard a "devil" in her head say, "Rockburne you can do that." Then she heard another, cautionary voice, an "angel," she supposes that said, "Don't go near it."

From blowup of the photographs she took of that magnificent field cut up and collaged within an ellipse, Rockburne made make open Sesame: Sky Chart (1991-99), a work upon paper she tinkered with for years, citing it as the impetus for her not away body of astronomical works, a certain quantity of of which were featured in her novel show "Ten Years of Astronomy Drawings 1990-2000" at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in novel York. The red colored-pencil ellipse that circumscribes the photographs in make open Sesame: Sky Chart refers to Kepler's first law of planetary motion, which states that planets travel in elliptical, not circular, orbits.

Rockburne's "exhaustive, empirical enterprise," as Robert Storr one time characterized it, has long been propell by the agency of issues that, for her, are greatest in quantity aptly and arrestingly discussed within the adjoining matter of mathematics and the sciences. Coming on the outside of two antithetical schools of thought--those of the Beaux-Arts and Black Mountain[1]--Rockburne has argued that the arts and sciences originate from a single source and are informed by the agency of the same reality. However, she emphatically identifies herself as an artist, a maker of art whose ideas are necessarily visual, who just happens to be "always fiddling" with science, always fascinated by the agency of questions that pertain to the nature of the physical world and its creations.

It is in mathematics and astronomy, as well as in music, that Rockburne finds harmonies, correspondences and patterns that constitute her idea of ultimate beauty and metaphysical significance. These manifestations of by what mode the world works indicate that no shape is arbitrary or isolated, that each part bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos the whole. The ramification of of that kind connections forms the true make submissive of her art. In the 1970 and 1980 Rockburne relied heavily upon a wide range of mathematics: put theory, the Fibonacci series, Mandelbrot's equation, of gold section rectangles, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry She also gazeed to Pascal's research and to the mathematics of chance as outlined by the agency of the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincare. At the same time, she continued to draw inspiration from Giotto, Piero, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the spatial and coloristic dissonances, deformations and disjunctions of late Mannerism. In the years leading up to her meeting in Rome, she had become to [i]or[/i] at a great depth immersed in astronomy and astrophysics, referring, in her work, to Copernicus, Kepler Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, as well as drawing upon data from observatories around the world.

by the agency of 1992, evidently not heeding her Roman angel, Rockburne created her have interpretation of the heavens in the regal Northern heavens and Southern Sky, two labor-intensive murals at Sony Music headquarters in novel York. More recently, she complet the electrifying Euclid's blazing star (1997), a fresco secco in the Media Union of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Juxtaposing early Renaissance with late Mannerist spatial combination of parts to form a wholes this is a high-stepping performance in which she plays her dazzling faculty of perception of color to great effect

a great deal of of Rockburne's recent production has been extrapolated from the abundance of bedecked and bejeweled images transmitted from the external reaches of space. The work in "Ten Years of Astronomy Drawings" is no exception. mainly moderate in size, it is characterized by dint of an explosion of vibrant colors and forms, the cosmos decanted into a teacup, as it were, and all the more clarified for its concentration, raising the question: At what scale can the magnitude of the universe be matched? What scale glory?.

The lock opener to Rockburne's works on paper was her "discovery" in the early '70 that paper had not solitary width and length, front and back, on the other hand also depth. This led to a series of two-sided drawings--it didn't matter to the artist which side was shown--that explored what she calls paper's "natural geometry" At this junction she began to make her much-praised enclosureed pieces, which were mathematically deduc and, as Rockburne sets it, had "nothing to do with origami." As well, she added the of gold section rectangle to her repertory of forms; its proportions (the division of a line for a like reason that the lesser of the sum of two units lengths stands in relationship to the greater as the greater does to the sum total of both), she believes, "plays a part in everything." This geometrical phenomenon has also inspired her to observe: "The universe has an up and down; I'm convinced that the shape of the universe--when they determine what it is--will be based upon the golden section."