infocus #22 September 2011 Written in Water

Martyn Kelly shares his series of paintings which represent a point on a journey which started whilst standing in front of a Renoir seascape in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and wondering at how the series of marks that appeared formless and even garish when viewed close up coalesced into a realistic and vibrant scene when one stood back.

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.70

There is a central, yet rarely stated, dilemma facing all who study the microscopic world: that to learn about the way that these hidden worlds are constructed and how they work, one first has to wrench this world apart, flatten its components under a cover slip and then view them at light intensities far exceeding anything that they encounter naturally. Freshwater ecologists risk losing any sense of the complexities of the systems they study, resorting instead to a “name-and-count” approach to
their discipline. Regaining this perspective requires a leap of imagination akin to that which drove early palaeontologists to start depicting dinosaurs as living animals inhabiting a recognisably different world to our own.

Return to listing

Author

Martyn Kelly

Martyn Kelly is a freelance freshwater biologist, specialising in studies of the freshwater algae. He has science degrees from the Universities of London and Durham, a degree in Fine Art from the University of Sunderland and is a Fellow of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management. Over the past decade he has worked extensively with environmental agencies in the UK and Ireland to develop approaches to assessing the ecological quality of the aquatic environment, and with the EU to ensure consistent application of these across Europe. He also teaches at the University of Newcastle. More of his pictures can be seen at www.martynkelly.co.uk.