When the dance of the sun and moon begins, some artists look to the sky for inspiration. Both within and beyond Oswego, artists are using the eclipse as a way to create art.
At Riverside Artisans, artist Bonnie Sommers hosted a special eclipse-themed paint party. While she hosts regular paint parties with seasonal paintings, this one was unique.
Sommers created a special eclipse piece using an array of blues.
“I knew it was the solar eclipse so it was going to be a midnight, twilight painting,” Sommers said. “So I had to search it and see different ways those blues and things came up and […] how it looked.”
Attendees were invited to follow Sommers as she demonstrated the step-by-step process of recreating her eclipse-based work, featuring the solar eclipse behind Oswego’s famous lighthouse.
Sommers encouraged painters to add their unique flair to their paintings, picking their own hues and scenery. Painters of all levels, from beginners to professionals like Sommers, were invited to attend and add a piece of their own work to their walls.
SUNY Oswego assistant professor of physics and planetarium director Natalia Lewandowska regularly attends these paint parties to relax.
“I do this for the fun and because I really like to use different parts of my brain when I paint,” Lewandowska said. “I don’t know how to explain this. It’s more like, the artistic part comes out.”
She was particularly excited to have an eclipse-based piece to paint and even bought Sommers’ original painting.
“Everyone seems to be inspired when they look up into the sky and look at the billions of stars that we actually see up there,” Lewandowska said. “But it’s inspiring to try to understand that we are a part of something very, very important.”
Students on SUNY Oswego’s campus are also bringing the eclipse into their art with an eclipse-inspired art exhibit. The exhibit’s organizer and professor Elizabeth Hunt says that it will include a wide variety of artwork, including paintings, photographs, posters, book art and sculptures.
“We have a lovely marble sculpture from a gentleman […] who is a faculty [member] on campus, but he is looking at the astronauts who actually set foot on the moon,” Hunt said. “So he’s actually altering it and adapting it every time one of those astronauts pass by, painting their names now in gold on it.”
The exhibit is located in Tyler Hall’s second-floor art gallery.
Off campus, Wayne Grim, a composer at the Exploratorium, is using sonification to turn the light of the eclipse into music. Sonification involves converting data into sound. Grim’s project is pulling the data from Junction, Texas.
Grim used this opportunity to do something visual instead of solely sound-based, like music often is. He said that experiencing an eclipse is a unique and exciting experience.
“It’s absolutely amazing,” he said. “It’s just so unreal, just how the temperature drops, the bird stops singing and it just gets really dark and quiet. It’s just hard to describe unless you’ve actually been there.”
Photo by: Mackenzie Shields
