Drawing the corona virus

It looks as if the Leeds Arts University will close its doors to students in the near future and if so, on-line resources will become more and more important. If you are a student and are in self-isolation, then you can use this blog as a way of keeping in touch with ideas about art practice.  I am still available to message, either via the comments boxes or via e mail and hopefully this emergency situation will be over in the near future. 

Those of you that follow this blog who are not students, again feel free to message me if there are any questions. 

As someone interested in drawing things, it is interesting to look at how the virus has been visualised. I have already made some drawings of it for a card game I’m designing in relation to an idea I have about contemporary votives, (see image above) and have therefore had to think about the relationship between images taken from electron microscopes and the processes of simplification for illustration purposes. 

Transmission electron microscope (TEM) from the centres of disease control and prevention (CDC) C S Goldsmith and T G Ksiazek (left) and NIAID (right) Arrowhead = corona/ halo around a viron 

This first image makes the virus look very amorphous, it looks alive but very indistinct, every virus also seems to be an individual, and its hard to sort out one from another, are they all examples of the same virus or is this the virus amongst other microscopic elements, such as blood cells? 

Image of corona virus in scientific paper that has been drawn on a CAD program

The CAD version above is very like a flower or arrangement of flowers erupting from an arid planet. Gone is all the indeterminacy of the photograph, the artist has given the virus a clear form and what was in the photograph a halo around a viron, is now a series of tufts surrounding a sphere. 

A more 'organic' image of the virus

The 'tufts' are in this image now more like organic tubes and the image appears much more transparent, suggestive of life more than the previous image, especially as the sphere is not uniform and it deviates from a circle. 

A more schematic CAD drawing

The CAD drawing above reinforces the 'flower' shape emerging from out of the sphere. 

Corona virus electron microscope photography

Looking again at an electron microscope image, we can 'see' what we are looking at a little clearer now, but just like the early drawings of the moon, there is room for a lot of invention. 

Needle tip, printed full-stop and razor’s edge: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665).

These images of the corona virus reminded me of the first drawings done through a hand held, lens focused microscope by Robert Hooke. In particular his drawing of a full stop, which looks like a planet with hairy extensions erupting out of it. This type of situation is key to an understanding of how images develop. The thing that sits in your mind is very different to the reality that is invading your body, but you can't think clearly about something that you can't see, so you need someone to produce an image to allow you to get your head around it. However these images are a product of imagination and our imaginations are often led into making intuitive leaps, usually based on one thing being like something else. 

I thought I'd seen these images before and realised it was in Salford when I went to see Karina Smigla-Bobinski's 'Ada' installation. Smigla-Bobinski was making an image based on a Platonic ideal of geometric form, but once let loose in a room, it made its mark by leaving traces of its contact on walls ceiling and floor using its charcoal tips. I can now see it as a metaphor for a virus, a new one that has come out of recent experience.

Karina Smigla-Bobinski: 'Ada' 

There is another series of associations that can be made with the corona virus and its depictions. Looking at the early electron microscope photograph of the virus above, it is described as ‘a corona / halo around a viron’.  (The infective, extracellular (outside the cell) form of a virus is called the viron) Coronas and halos are metrological terms for certain atmospheric phenomena and these terms are themselves derived from religious iconography. 

Virgin Mary with halo

The earliest form of what we now call a halo, was something that surrounded the whole body and was called the aureola. This was the concept of a surrounding aura, glow or irradiation used in Christian and other religions to single out figures that had first of all God like status, and then later other elevated beings such as saints or the virgin Mary. 

The aureola, is often in the form of an ellipse that surrounds the whole body, while the halo or nimbus usually takes the form of a luminous disk surrounding the back of the head.

Two examples of mandorlas in Eastern Orthodox Church imagery

I think the most interesting form of the aureola is the mandorla, as used in Eastern Orthodox Church icons. It is used to depict sacred moments which transcend time and space, such as the resurrection, transfiguration or the ascension.  These oval or sometimes circular figure surrounds are painted in several concentric patterns of colour that grow darker as they come close to the centre, or figure of Christ. This is in keeping with the church's use at the time of apophatic or negative theology, which was an attempt to approach any descriptions of God by negation. The theory was that to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God, was the only way to get an idea across that God was beyond perfection. Therefore, paradoxically, in these images, as holiness increases, there is no way to depict its brightness, except by darkness. This idea of negative depiction is an interesting concept that can perhaps be used to illuminate ideas about what a corona virus looks like. 

Buddha with halo

The halo is seen in Christian, Greek and Buddhist art, as a circular form surrounding the head that appears to have light radiating from it. It is used to enable audiences to pick out the more spiritual players in complex religious images.  In more secular imagery, Roman emperors are sometimes depicted with rays of the sun emanating from their head, although this was probably related to their interest in Sol Invictus, a later Roman religion whereby sun worship was being returned to. 

Sol Invictus

In all cases the halo signifies importance and it is the sun that is the most important thing to us on Earth; we are both derived from it and sustained by it. Depictions of the sun god Ra in Egyptian carvings reflecting the fact that this image has a long tradition. 

Images of Ra

The nimbus, a term often used instead of halo, constitutes the idea of a crown modified by the emanation of light from the head of a superior being. The crown of course has long been used to identify superior beings. 

Corona is of course defined as, resembling or likened to a crown. The sun's corona is normally visible only during a total solar eclipse, when it is seen as an irregularly shaped glowing nimbus surrounding the darkened disc of the moon. 

Sun's corona seen during an eclipse by the moon

Once again we begin to see a negative being used to allow us to see something positive. It is the moon’s removing from our sight the centre of the image of the sun that allows us to appreciate the sun’s corona. 

So by a convoluted path we can return to images of the virus and perhaps see them as part of a long tradition of trying to visualise those things that cant be seen and in particular those things that by their very nature are beyond our comprehension. 

Disneyfication of a corona virus

Disneyfication is defined as: the transformation of something real or unsettling into something perfectly safe or into a carefully controlled and safe entertainment. By trying to represent something that is so feared, (like god or in this case the devil) in a way that resembles the way we draw cartoon characters, perhaps its harsh nature is also softened in the mind. 

The corona halo

When you push all the metaphors together, what you get is a corona sitting within a halo. The virus becomes a sun god.

Shrine to St. Corona

Saint Corona was often called upon by gamblers and treasure hunters as well as those seeking good fortune when dealing with money. 

Money as good fortune sun god

Thinking about art and what it helps us to think about may at least form some sort of distraction. 

Take care everyone and I shall try to keep posting from isolation. 

See also:

Hands, hygiene and hope

Drawing and thinking: how to understand the virus

The virus is looking at you

Connecting the singularity 

Drawing and isolation

More on Disney

A more painterly response