Wednesday, July 17, 2013

How to illustrate a physics textbook

Quantum, physics, Charlene Brown
(click on image to enlarge)

Glacier on a staircase
Watercolour, crayon and gouache
©2013 Charlene Brown

Marcel Duchamp intended his famous Nude Descending a Staircase to be “an expression of time and space through the abstract presentation of motion.” 
Duchamp’s masterpiece was initially rejected by both the Cubists and the Futurists, with one critic dismissing it as ‘an explosion in a shingle factory.’ This startling turn of phrase seemed like a good guideline for generating an ‘abstract presentation of motion’ – in this case the disappearance of a glacier over the hundred-year period from 1910 to 2010  as previously illustrated on 1150 Words.