over 30 years ago my high school friend called me an idiot and an imbecile because I told him that our solar system is not stationary. I suggested to him that as one of the results of the “Big Bang”, it is constantly traveling through space. of course I did not imagine the vortex as beautifully illustrated in this computer graphic animation (CGA) video, but I would love to track him down so that I could use this video illustration to rub it in his face. I was not as dumb as I was made to believed.

anyway, think about this, our solar system is traveling through space. we are space travelers and we all do not realize this because our existence is relative to our earth. also, our solar system is a microscopic speck relative to our immense galaxy which is also traveling through space while our solar system, along with countless other solar systems, is PROBABLY “orbiting” a black hole in the middle of same galaxy. getting a headache yet? our galaxy is one of countless other galaxies in the universe. they are also traveling through space. i cannot wait to cross over to the other side. i want to explore the infinite universe.

so what does this has to do with art? well, one thing we all know is that nothing is stationary. nature has demonstrated this in the galactic scale down to the sub atomic scale that it is always moving, and always changing. when i paint a subject, i struggle to remind myself that whatever that is in my line of sight for my painting does not have to be a replica, because the moment i move my eyes from the subject to the canvas, and place the beginning of a mark, something in some level has changed. it is never the same. even hyperrealistic painters have to resolve that they have to adapt to the changes that they see or sense before them because nothing is ever exactly what they thought they saw. this, to me, is what creativity is about—adapting to changes because nothing sits still.

source of screen capture: The helical model–our solar system is a vortex