One of the most decidedly challenging endeavors that resonates with any amateur artist is trying to take a picture of the moon on your phone. Second to that is taking a photo of ocean waves and realizing that no matter how hard you try, the product will never capture the enormity and ephemeral nature of the deep sea. According to the National Ocean Service, more than 80% of the world’s oceans remain unmapped and unexplored despite covering more than 70% of the planet’s surface; considering statistics like these are humbling because they remind us just how small we humans are in the world we live in. They also make me feel overwhelmed — how can we discover more? Autonomous underwater vehicles? Sonar technology to map seafloors? How about through artwork? For artist Lily Simonson, the answer to that question was becoming an Artist-at-Sea with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, allowing her to travel on an oceanographic expedition along the California coast in an effort to bring back methane seeps to viewers like you and me.
The Schmidt Ocean Institute is one of several institutions of its kind dedicated to furthering global marine research by making at-sea expeditions accessible for all oceanographic scientists and engineers. Most deep-sea exploration equipment is expensive and manufactured in small quantities, and few people are able to get themselves to the middle of the ocean on their own. The Schmidt Ocean Institute provides researchers with the technology and informational support needed to make meaningful discoveries at sea, and most importantly, they have a ship for these trips.
The research vessel Falkor is where Simonson completed her Artist-at-Sea fellowship in 2018, but several years prior, she contributed to developing the initial vision for the program. In 2013, Lily Simonson participated in a panel for the Schmidt Ocean Institute, focused on how they could improve outreach efforts to scientists and artists about this new program — at the time, she also met Peter Girguis, a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and head of a lab that studies deep sea microorganisms. “He had an expedition that was going to be funded and supported by Schmidt, and he had an extra berth on the ship, so an extra spot, which I was invited to take.”
Artist-at-Sea is a project within the Schmidt Ocean Institute that seeks to create deep connections between artists and scientists so that they can tell important stories about our oceans in ways that are both meaningful and palatable for interested audiences. “A lot of the public doesn’t find scientific research to be accessible or easy to understand or as something that is relatable. And so by embedding within the scientific group and making art based on their discoveries, I wanted to translate some of the research or pique a viewer’s interests in that research and transport them to this world you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Going all the way to the bottom of the sea: you can’t do that without crazy equipment. You can read about the ocean and watch documentaries, but only art can evoke a whole atmosphere and create a transformative experience for the viewer,” she told me, as she clarified the unique importance of artwork in science, two fields that are typically seen to lie on opposite sides of an academic spectrum. Simonson explained that while the program is no-strings-attached in terms of the types of projects artists have to complete on their time aboard Falkor, they are encouraged to connect with the scientists on the ship and incorporate aspects of the scientific discoveries into their artwork.
While Simonson’s own project with Artist-at-Sea began in 2013, it wasn’t her first oceanographic exploration. “I started early on in my career looking at preserved specimens, so working with scientists in their labs on the ground. And then by getting to know them, I started getting invited to join research expeditions… Once I started working directly with scientists, I wanted to work from observations, I wanted to look at the specimens I was painting rather than work from previously taken photographs. And once I got to know the scientists studying these things, I became more interested in the actual research happening and all the discoveries constantly being made in the deep sea. These areas of our planet have not been well explored, so we’re always discovering something new. The experience of discovery and research and being in the field became much more a central subject matter for my work.” Simonson has been working with scientists for a decade now, but she told me that throughout her life, she has always been interested in a variety of fields — including psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy — and she wanted to be an artist because to her, it meant taking intangible ideas and bringing them into the material world in a beautiful, physical way. In fact, this is why for her undergraduate studies, she decided not to go to art school but instead to a research institution like UC Berkeley. A decade into deep sea exploration, Simonson has had the chance to go on ships with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and worked with researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The Nautilus, and the 2014-15 National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which took her to Antarctica for three months to scuba dive beneath the sea ice and paint a world many of us won’t ever see so closely ourselves. “I like to work from direct observation because with painting, you have the opportunity to convey so much detail, but when working from a photo, you don’t get to choose the details that you can highlight.”
Simonson’s project focused on methane seeps, a point in the ocean floor where rocks release methane, a greenhouse gas, into the water above. There are many types of ocean seeps that release a variety of byproducts like petroleum, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide. Methane seeps, also known as methane vents or cold seeps, hold a critical link in a unique food chain of biota that do not rely on the sun to fuel photosynthesis and do not require plants to sustain the chain. “There are a bunch of organisms and bacteria that live off the methane itself. No light at the bottom of the sea, right, so there’s this whole food chain where creatures turn that methane to energy. Bacteria eat the sulfur and methane and then animals directly eat the bacteria,” she explained. Studying cold seeps provides scientists with a rare understanding of the biomes that support a variety of ocean species, and as ocean floor litter and chemical contaminants threaten the fauna, the ability to see how marine organisms respond to these processes will give insight into how ocean life will evolve alongside climate change.
“I wanted to make paintings based on these structures in the ocean floor that are formed as a byproduct of the bacteria that eats the methane and sulfur: carbonate structures. The bacteria create these 3D rocks, formations that look like sculptures in all types of shapes. It’s not clear why they form in this way, but this is what I planned to paint,” Simonson said of her thought process going into the Artist-at-Sea program. Once the expedition was underway, her creative process was twofold: first, she made a smaller painting of what she observed directly in the field. Once she got back to her studio in Los Angeles, she then used those paintings as studies for larger, mural-sized paintings. The original, small takes were made using more common acrylic paints, but the final large-scale paintings were made using blacklight fluorescent paint, which is translucent in bright light but acquires a luminous quality when in the dark and lit by special blacklights. “I use a glazing technique that’s loosely-based on Renaissance glazing techniques where, instead of mixing together the colors on your palette, you put lots and lots of thin translucent strokes on the canvas. Those overlapping layers add up to create the final image on the canvas.” Glazing allows Simonson’s paintings to glow in a way they wouldn’t have with just one or two single layers of paint because the blacklight is allowed to travel through the different paint strokes and bounce off the different layers, allowing for a greater sense of depth and dimension on the canvas. “I also like the reference to 1960s psychedelics and ‘90s rave culture [that the blacklight paints give] because the subjects I paint are so wild and the environments themselves and creatures all seem like a hallucination…they’re so unlike anything we see in our day-to-day lives…So my style isn’t super hyper realistic or hyper detailed, but…the deep sea is like a parallel universe, and I really love the experience of a viewer not knowing if they’re looking at something real or imagined and then understanding that it is something real and it’s wild.”
Lily Simonson’s work aboard the Falkor with Peter Girguis ultimately culminated in six mural-sized paintings in her exhibition, Lily Simonson: Painting the Deep at Harvard University’s Museum of Natural History. Her paintings speak to a deep appreciation for the history of artists and scientists collaborating: “I’m inspired by artists being scientists and vice versa. Like John James Audubon or Maria Marien, these artists who explored new areas and discovered new species and showed those discoveries through their paintings.” More recently, Simonson is collaborating with Victoria Orphan, a geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies how marine microbes interact with one another. Her paintings will showcase these chemosynthetic microbes and will be installed as part of an immersive 3D exhibition.
To see more of Simonson’s work, visit her website here.
