Waves of Glass (1999)
  by Darien A. Large

This composition was arranged from three primary elements, described below from left to right:

The candle is a sketch taken from Christiaan Huygens's "Treatise on Light" presented in 1678 to the Royal Academy of Science in France (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1939). The primary argument of the treatise, which the sketch supports indirectly, is that light is a wave-like phenomenon and not transmitted simply by particles traveling from the source to its destination. The wave nature of light was hotly contested at the time; Isaac Newton was the most prestigious advocate of the so-called corpuscular theory and was therefore Huygen's conceptual "arch-enemy" with respect to the theory of light.

The glowing orange object is a photograph taken by the current artist in 1990 of the inside of a Freixenet champagne bottle. The bottle was illuminated from the outside with a flashlight, and the photograph was taken from the point of view of the neck of the bottle, looking inside towards the bottom. A portion of the word "Freixenet" is faintly legible towards the circumference.

The photograph of the moon was taken during the partial lunar eclipse of May 24, 1994 from Fort Collins, Colorado. The photographer and copyright status are unknown; a .gif file of this photograph was downloaded from the SUNET (Swedish University Network) archives at http://ftp.sunet.se/ftp/pub/pictures/astro-images/.

These three elements were assembled by the current artist in December 1999 using Adobe Photoshop 5.0 with a screen resolution of 300 dpi, and printed on photographic paper on a Lexmark 5700 color inkjet printer at a print resolution of 1200 dpi. The work is generally intended to evoke the winter season, the passing of the winter solstice, and the festive aspects of New Year's celebrations in the West.

--DAL