Painting in Microgravity: Beginnings

I unzipped the creativity chamber and entered. (I had originally used the word “Tabernacle” to signify the “creativity chamber” and to site “its basis in ritual” [27].) Equipped with my motion-sickness bags, swim cap and goggles, I experiencing various forms of disorientation as everything floated around me. Sometime after parabola 20, I was able to attach canvas, while floating in the space, to the interior of the chamber. Plummeting to the floor with the return of gravity, I was ready begin my “study of fluid dynamics.”

The time had finally come for me to paint, so I took a pastry bag and began to squeeze (Fig. 15). My experiences with microgravity dynamics were without precedence in my experience as an artist. I felt great satisfaction with what was happening. The evolution of the forms was unexpectedly ethereal. The paint and I floated in what I remember as slow motion. Every action was elementary; I had little control over the outcome, yet I began to understand some things about this working space. Various pastry tips indeed produced different-sized biomorphic paint blobs whose velocity was dependent upon the movement of the jet and the pressure I exerted on the paint applicators. I planned to wear goggles to protect my eyes from getting paint in them; however, I did not expect the humidity from sweating, due to a lack of convection, to fill the chamber and render the goggles useless. Surprisingly, I discovered that the floating paint presented very little hazard. I was able to build up initial judgements about floating in harmony with the paint, on which I based future actions.

Paint did escape out of the creativity chamber’s air vent as my body pressed the paint through the lavender meshed opening. It is significant to me that NASA staff decided to allow the paint to remain on the ceiling of the jet. In a New York Times article highlighting the project, M.G. Lord stated: “NASA, however, left the marks alone. ‘There’s a wonderful little abstract blob on the ceiling,’ Mr. Fort said. ‘It’s considered art’” [28]. I fully believe, despite confronting some anticipated resistance from some camps within NASA, that NASA colleagues at the local level truly understood the scientific importance of our work as artists.

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