Amy Peters Wood

Egg tempera and gold leaf have historically been used in painting religious icons. In the Icon series, gold leaf is also used to depict religious objects. It is hoped that the Hadron collider at Cern will produce the elusive Higgs boson — often dubbed the God Particle. In the painting “Cleaning the Collider Crumbs” a maintenance worker sweeps up debris from construction. As the refuse falls into the abyss out of view, it turns into gold leaf crumbles.
Representing that which we are seeking, may not be found, because we are blind to god’s existence.

Inspired by MIT Physics professor Walter Lewin, Tsunami evokes the essence of fragility in our world. Through near picture perfect diagrams and step by step mathematical handholding, Lewin walks students through Newtonian physics with the aid of a chalk board. At the end of the lecture all the concepts and equations are gone- with one swipe of an eraser. Following the Japan earthquake and tsunami, whole cities were similarly wiped away with one stroke. This painting done in egg tempera, black board paint and chalk, depicts Miami and its close proximity to the sea, which like other coastal cities worldwide, can one moment be completely quiescent and the next- cataclysmically catastrophic. The equation on the blackboard is one of Lewin’s equations, the energy in a wave is proportional to the amplitude squared.