An older oil painting of mine, embodying the Mother Nature on Mars and the ALH84001 meteorite. (Portions of this post are reposted from May 2008, with new images.) Click to enlarge.
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| This image appears in my latest calendar. Did you know you can choose which month my calendars start in? Click here to check calendar collection 3. |
This painting was inspired by the Martian meteorite, ALH84001 and the inscription is carved into the rock in the bottom left.
The figure represents a mythology that never-was, the personification of Mother Nature on the planet Mars, wasted and haunting.
After struggling with a "mermaid's purse" shark egg to represent the false hope of organisms on Mars, I eventually attended a lecture at the University of Toronto where the topic of discussion was the possible discovery of fossil remnants in a meteor that originated on Mars. I learned about the magnetite chains found in the meteor, and watched a video of the cute little microbes whipping this way and that, following a moving magnet. I replaced the shark egg with an enlarged, ruptured microbe immediately.
Until that lecture, this painting sat unfinished and abandoned for over a year, and I was sure I would paint over it. It's something I seldom do, but I really wasn't fond of it. The addition of the magnetite-bearing microbe made all the difference to me.
The face was a sort of riff on the infamous hill-face on Mars, later proved to be simply a low-res, shadowed coincidence. I felt the debunked image lent a certain poignancy to Mother Mars.
Mars is what we make it. Perhaps a future mission will find signs of life in the Martian arctic? If not, it continues to be a planet of hope, and one we invest more myths, ideas and dreams in than any planet other than our own.
Here is one of Phoenix's photos of the Martian arctic:
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| © NASA |
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
