Brown Dwarf (version 1)

At first, I was thinking of titling this piece Twisted Mountain because of the twisting formation I drew in the foreground. The idea here grew from the Rub el Hizb form I drew at the beginning of this drawing. Rub el Hizb is an Islamic star, it’s an eight pointed star, as opposed to the six pointed star of the Star of David. I just like the shape of it. It reminds me of a mathematical attempt to estimate Pi, the circumference of a circle, and represent it as a finite number.

The overlapping squares make me think of frames, as in picture frames. Frames attempt to capture beauty, or a thing of interest, for an artist and his or her audiences. It’s like the light of this star is being bound by a limiting frame. I drew some parallelogram mosaic pieces surrounding the black frame holding the star bound in its place in the sky.

After making these observations, I decided to title this piece Brown Dwarf. I remembered from an astronomy class at RCC that there are stars called brown dwarfs, which are astronomical bodies that are between planets and stars. So they’re becoming stars. Jupiter is considered a potential star, but both brown dwarf stars and Jupiter are not massive enough to sustain the nuclear fusion that is necessary to turn hydrogen into helium at their cores.

This drawing is composed of ballpoint, and gel pens as media that I used to draw on paper media. It took me a longer time to complete because drawing each mosaic square with these pens was a patient and extensive process. If you are interested in the original drawing, or if you are interested in acquisitioning a high quality, ltd edition print of it, please email me at artofevan@hotmail.com. The print edition of this piece is limited to 25.