Today the New York Times posted incredible pictures taken from the Hubble Telescope. It never ceases to amaze me the capacity we have to see these ethereal images that hardly seem real. My favorite picture in the slideshow was The Butterfly Nebula:
It’s thrilling not only because of the fact it really looks like a butterfly, but I’m blown away by the imagery of the energy escaping its center. After a friend told me about how nebulas are where stars are born and also where they die, I was inspired to do piece about two years ago called “Expansion”:
"Expansion", 26x40 inches Watercolor by Jaimee Todd
I wanted to do a painting in an homage to nebulas but I didn’t want to do something that looked like an attempted replication of what I saw in the Hubble photographs. I usually don’t like to try to reinvent the wheel when I’m painting off an already existing piece of subject matter; I feel like no one does a better job than mother nature. Instead, try to bring a whole level of emotion to it through abstraction. In this case, I wanted to represent the idea of birth, death and turmoil by creating a dual image; a fiery, star-infested storm juxtaposed against a tree, a giver of life. I used a lot of wet paint and kosher salt to create texture and turmoil in the burnt orange center of the nebula and then added salt in the purple background to represent outer space and its infinite grasp.
Eventually I’d like to return to painting celestial subject matter because outer space and it’s related phenomena continually fascinate me. It’s a reminder of life’s infinite possibilities.
