Binary Black Holes: Painting “The Abyssal Dance”

It's been a busy two weeks here for me as we come to the end of the year, but I'm now on vacation for the rest of December and can actually relax a bit. This past week I finished the other large-scale painting project I've been working on since September, and can finally show it off! (Before flying back to California tomorrow to see family for a few weeks.)

Sometime around the start of this year, when I was helping back the production of Black 3.0 on Kickstarter, I had the idea of using it to paint the black holes in a binary black hole system (two black holes orbiting each other). I picked up a canvas and painted it black (with standard black gesso, nothing special), then got distracted by other projects for about six months. (This was right around the time I was starting lots of different projects, including my Main Sequence star series.) I never forgot the idea, though, and finally came back to it sometime in September with some more experience under my belt, some Black 3.0 in my possession, and some fresh ideas.

One of those ideas was to film the entire process and make a time lapse video out of it, which I finished just today! It was a lot of work to make, but I think it came out pretty well. Here's the completed painting:

“The Abyssal Dance,” 70×50 cm, acrylic on canvas.

The accretion disks around the black holes were the last parts to be added, and I think they turned out really well and add a certain je ne sais quoi to the entire composition. I'd have more to say about it but I'm flying out tomorrow morning and need to keep this short. For more information on the painting process, you can watch this video:

I talked about it a bit more in the video description, but the name came to me in a poetic mood; abyss comes from the Greek words for “without bottom,” or bottomless, which struck me as a good description for a black hole from the point of view of an observer outside one (i.e., us). And the dance part comes from the slow but steadily-increasing inspiral of the two dancers, as they radiate away gravitational radiation, until they finally come together with incredible celerity and merge into one. And that's all for now. A hui hou!