Today, we visited the Center for Advanced Materials Characterization (CAMCOR) here at the University of Oregon. As I walked in, I was told to stomp my shoes on a sticky mat to remove all of the debris my Nikes had attracted on my walk over. After stepping off the mat and almost losing a shoe to the gluey rubber, I felt large fans blowing in my face, which I later learned were put in to blow all of the loose dust off people before they entered the laboratory. This place clearly knows what they’re doing, I thought to myself.
As a class we sat in on an exclusive talk with Dr. Richard Taylor, a British scientist who specializes in Jackson Pollock paintings. During his early morning talk I managed to keep my eyes open, unlike some of the class, because I was so interested in the topic. What impressed me the most about Dr. Taylor’s presentation, besides his work in seven countries and more than 250 publications, was that he knew what he wanted to do with his life at only nine years old! As a young boy growing up in England, he found a Jackson Pollock book at a yard sale, was intrigued by the random lines on the pictures of his canvas’ in the book, and hasn’t looked back since. Originally at college in the UK for science, he also enrolled in art school because he wanted to pursue fractals in Pollock’s works. What amazed me most, was how although Pollock died at such a young age of 44, people like Dr. Taylor still have such a complete grasp on his techniques and works, which really shows a true dedication to his work. He is now one of the leading scholars on Pollock, and it was an honor listening to a private lecture from him.
Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock is valued at $600 million, painted in 1952
After Dr. Taylor’s lecture, I took a tour of the CAMCOR facilities, and I was very impressed, to say the least, with their hundreds of millions of dollars worth of technology. They clearly took the whole picture into account when constructing the building, because they had everything from sound proof walls, to colored LED light strips that were scientifically proven to relieve stress.
GIF file of a Jackson Pollock inspired painting, click to view
One topic in his presentation that inspired my project for this class was Jackson Pollock’s idea of the splatter paint technique. As I’ve stated in recent posts, my idea for my final project is to combine CabSpotting by Peter Richards and Contained by Daniel Miller and produce a heat map representing the density of people on the university of Oregon campus at different times of the day. I have been wondering how to color coat my heat map, and listening to Dr. Taylor talk about splatter painting gave me the idea to make my heat map using the splatter painting method. It’s an idea that is for future thought, but I got really excited when it came to my mind.
The article about Dr. Taylor’s work that we read the other night was a little confusing, and I got frustrated with all of the complicated terms in it. However, listening to Richard’s talk after reading the article really cemented the information and knowledge I gathered from the article and made sense of it. I look forward to more guest speakers who have the same charisma, expertise and passion for their work as Dr. Richard Taylor does, and I hope to listen to one of his talk’s again soon.