Read on Twitter
Attention! This is my long overdue debut for explaining my artwork! I do artwork in addition to science and coding, and occasionally my art sorta discusses science. I'd like to start with my 2019 piece "Like Clockwork", pictured here. 1/
I'm starting with this one since I introduced it in this AWESOME thread of scientists who craft: 2/ https://twitter.com/catcherinthepi3/status/1312090345992146944?s=20
"Like Clockwork" began way back in 2013, in the summer after I finished college and was gearing up to start a Research Fulbright in Barcelona. I read "A Clockwork Orange" for the first time. I had profound thoughts at the time. I do not remember what they were. 3/
Whatever those profound thoughts were, I started drawing them. They consisted of a skull being peeled like an orange, where the undersides of the peel reflected some of humanity's achievements: science, music, math, exploration, religion, computation. 4/
I stopped there, with very rough guidelines in place to make it an art nouveau-inspired piece, with a structure kinda like this 5/
I took the piece with me to Barcelona but never worked on it there. I took the sketch with me to Berkeley when I started graduate school, and every year I wondered when I would work on it...until 2018. 6/
Y'see, I refrained from touching it because I didn't want to destroy the precision and realism of the skull. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to produce anything as good elsewhere, since my style veered from strict realism since 2013. 7/
In 2018 I was hoping to have a piece go into a dark art show, since I was loosely affiliated with a dark art community starting around 2016. I wanted to prove I was hardcore enough; I needed to make shit with skulls and exposed body tissues. This piece was waiting for me... 8/
Without detailing the past 7 years of my life, let's just say I'm a very different person than I was in 2013. Nowadays I live in the Bay Area, I'm a scientist, I know lots of people in AI. I'm thrust into lots of sci-fi conversations about humanity's future all the time. 9/
I wanted to make a piece that makes one question their humanity. The disembodied eyes looking into the skull act as a mirror for examining the self. Underneath the wrappings of technological and artistic achievement we are piles of meat. How often do we think about that? 10/
I didn't want to preach a message on this image, so...instead, I loaded it with objects you can interpret as you wish. The orange trees are there to continue the orange peel motif, and represent the wider natural world. 11/
The C3PO-ish arm is a robot arm, the other is a skeletal arm. The phases of the moon and the clocks represent different ways to imagine the passage of time. 12/
The lab in the background has a distillation apparatus, a fume hood, and lots of flasks because I have a chemistry background and it's fun drawing synthetic labs...even if I never got a decent yield in those labs. 13/
The really fun place to look is in the peel. I am extremely please with myself for how tiny the details are. There's a nature scene, a passage from the Bible, some random music, the time-dependent Schrodinger equation, and a grim message I wrote in binary. 14/
This piece was done in colored pencil. The total dimensions are 11 " x 8 " (28 cm x 20.3 cm), so the details really are tiny. This easily is one of the most detailed pieces I've done. 
15/
15/
I never submitted it to that art show, because the art show never happened. Its debut in a gallery setting was set to open to the public the weekend lockdown orders were enacted in San Francisco. 16/
So, given the attention from Katharine Hayhoe's thread, I wanted it to have a public "art talk" of sorts. Here it is! "Like Clockwork". I hope you enjoyed its history and me not giving you my interpretation of it. :) 17/
"Like Clockwork" is FOR SALE. It's framed and everything. I'd love for it to go home to someone. DM me or contact me here if you're interested. COVID makes this complicated, but we can work out how to safely show you details, quality, etc. /end https://andreanarosnik.com/contact
