Odds

This afternoon, knowing the carpet would be vacuumed once our Christmas tree was packed away, I sprinkled some loose catnip in a sunbeam so our cat Tommy might play in it. For a while ran, rolled, sniffed and munched the fragrant herb, then he settled into a warm spot and slept. His sleek form was a study in light and shadow, one I could not properly capture on film, no matter how filled the dark areas with flash.

I’ve been engrossed by the play of light since I first started seriously drawing at age eight and began representing things as three-dimensional. I studied a number of art books and carefully read everything I could about how light functioned.

Of all my resources, one of the best was not an art book, but a scientific treatise: Isaac Newton’s Opticks. The volume has been faithfully reproduced in all its permutations and combinations at The Newton Project, now my favorite site devoted to the physicist. As the opening says, “Our interactive diplomatic transcriptions show all the additions, deletions and other changes that Newton made to his texts.

In other words, it’s a lot like watching a great mind at work, editing and shaping thought as Newton works through his theories. Fascinating stuff.

Drawing of Isaac Newton as a geometer was created in 1995 by William Blake. Image via Wikipedia.

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