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Dominic Man-Kit Lam: Chromoskedasic Painting
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10777 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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3 / 1993 |
340 Words |
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Dominic Man-Kit Lam is a most unusual artist: A modern-day Chinese literatus, he has gained international renown not only as an artist but also as a distinguished scientist and successful entrepreneur. A professor of biotechnology, cell biology, and ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) near Houston and director of the Center for Biotechnology there, Lam is an expert in the physiology of visual perception, and the founder of Houston Biotechnology Inc.
But ever since Lam started to study traditional Chinese painting at the age of six, art has been his first love. A serendipitous discovery in 1980 while developing a black-and-white photograph of a retina led Lam to the invention of an entirely new art medium, "chromoskedasic painting." Coined by Bryant Rossiter, former director of the chemistry division at Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories, the term is derived from the Greek meaning "color by light scattering."
These paintings are not produced with pigmentation, as is normal, but through the subtle manipulation of photo developer, fixing, and bleaching solutions on black-and-white photographic paper, a process that produces and controls silver particles of varying sizes on the paper. When light is cast on one of these paintings, the silver particles scatter the light, resulting in the perception of color by the observer. The mechanism that makes it possible to produce color entirely from black-and-white photographic materials is similar to what makes the sky blue. The sky appears blue because dust, water vapor, and other particles in the atmosphere are of such a size that they selectively back scatter light from the blue region of the spectrum to the observer's eye. Likewise, silver particles of different sizes in
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