Somewhere Between Jupiter and Mars
Levi Keatts
March 3, 2020
Major: Art Foundation (intended Painting/Mathematics double major)
Genre/Medium: oil on canvas and jasper beads
About the work: This piece is a homage to the advancement of art and exploration. Debatably, one of the earliest known pieces of art was the Makapansgat pebble. This is a small red jasperite rock that looks like it has a face on it, which was caused by natural withering. Some early human found this pebble and decided to carry it back to their cave roughly 20 miles away. This makes me think about how far we have come as humans–from being enamored with a pebble to sending an unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid far away from Earth and making art about it. (Because Psyche and Earth orbit at different speeds, the distance from Earth to Psyche varies over a large range, from < 2 astronomical units, or AU, to > 4 AU!) I hoped to display this with a three-panel painting. The first panel shows a human surrounded by jasper beads, representing the Makapansgat pebble. The second panel depicts the moon, representing one of the most noteworthy feats of human exploration. And finally, the last panel depicts the asteroid (16) Psyche, representing our current field of exploration.
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