Recently I have been pondering on matter. Walk along a beach and you may note that higher up the beach the stones are larger than those nearer the water, closer still and the shore is sand. If there is a cliff face there will be rocks at its base not yet smoothed by wave erosion. As the waves crash over the rocks bits fall off and are smoothed, smaller stones and sand are washed up from the beach. The smaller stones will nestle in the spaces between the rocks and the sand will get trapped between those stones. Each grade of eroded cliff will find a place for itself.
Sand can become very fine. How far can the process of breaking up the particle go? Roughly 450 years BCE the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus came up with the idea of the indivisible particle. As he cut a block of cheese, he considered that there must be a particle that could not be cut or divided further, in Greek, ‘atomos’, meaning ‘uncuttable’. Around 1800, scientist, John Dalton, experimentally demonstrated the existence of a fundamental particle that he theorised was the building block of all matter. He described it as the ‘atom’.
However, by 1897 scientists found that the atom wasn’t indivisible. J. J. Thompson was studying electricity and deduced that smaller particles, electrons, were responsible for the properties of electricity and possessed negative charge. This implied that another part of the atom must have positive charge. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford determined that atoms had a positively charged nucleus at their centre.
The process of sub-division of the atom continues. Experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN investigate particles, christened Quarks, Leptons and famously, the Higgs Boson but the full story of the nature of matter is still not complete.
With my recently completed painting, A Process of Subdivision, I devised my own physical process. I didn’t have an end image in mind and just painted some large, stone like, shapes inside which I painted smaller ‘stone’ shapes, fitting successive generations of shapes in the negative spaces formed by the previous generation. Each shape was a subdivision of the larger shape and occupied its own place in the painting. The animation I prepared, below, shows how the painting developed.
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Stuart Nurse 