Festival Artist 2007: Thomas Eisner
From NY Times, October 10, 2006, by James Gorman
"In 1952, Thomas Eisner, a graduate student at Harvard, drove around North America for two months with a fellow student, Edward O. Wilson, to see the country and its insects. For the past half century, Dr. Eisner, now an emeritus professor at Cornell, continued his travels in the fields of entomology, evolutionary biology, chemical ecology and conservation. Dr. Eisner became known not only for his research but also for capturing the natural world in astonishing images In the introduction to Dr. Eisner's 2003 book "For Love of Insects," Dr. Wilson described him as "a world-class biologist who is also a naturalist of such exceptional talent, intensity and breadth as to deserve the title ิthe modern Fabre,' after France's great pioneer observer of insect life." That is Jean-Henri Fabre, who himself was called the Homer of the insect world.
Recently, however, the limitations of Parkinson's disease led Dr. Eisner to explore the capabilities of a new tool for capturing the natural world: the color copier. Now commonly available, the copier, he writes in an e-mail message, "can serve for the inventive generation of imagery, for composition of novel pictorial arrangements, and in that capacity find use in the expression of fantasy."
How did these images come to be? "I simply imagined how the component parts of a given arrangement might fit together," Dr. Eisner writes, "and laid out the parts in accord with the vision. It was like playing with a Lego set. There were only two provisos. Parts had to be laid out upside down on the copier's stage, because the copier 'sees' the stage from beneath, and the arrangements, once composed, had to be covered with a black velvet cloth to exclude ambient light from the picture."
Copiers, he suggests, might be useful for children, for adults in nursing homes, or for anyone who has limited mobility and access to the natural world. They can produce stunning images. At a cost of a few hundred dollars, he said, every nursing home could have one. "
Image at right: Ice Moon by Thomas Eisner
