My son Avi’s final art project for his class at PSU this semester (with explanation!)

Completed: 12/8/2021

An explanation of this piece of art
by Avi Rubin [age 16]

Introduction by Mom:

Since Avi has a brain injury from being acutely Lead poisoned at 7-months-old (with – among other impacts – his visual memory diagnosed as being in the 4th percentile when he was 7 years old) he uses computer tools like “text to speech” and “speech to text” for writing and reading narratives. In some way these tools are magical in what they allow him to do and in other ways they have a long way to go before they truly facilitate learning for people like Avi – with a diagnosed brain injury.

He is not yet able to read and write anywhere near grade level without assistance. His writing level (the mechanics of his writing – when writing by hand) is at about the 6th grade level – even though his level of comprehension and expression far exceeds his “official” grade level (which technically would be 11th grade/ high school.)

When information is presented using auditory tools (when Avi doesn’t have to struggle to read written text on a page) he understands concepts at the graduate-school level. Audiobooks are his best friend – but unfortunately most text books do not have an audiobook option. He is consciously and intentionally working on improving his reading and writing skills every day.

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This is my final art project from my first college art class. The assignment was to do something about the human form or human nature.

I chose for the theme, the fact that there has been a lot of separation and uncooperativeness between the different scientific disciplines – and when they do work together, amazing discoveries are made — and how that is an analogy (in that, when not even the scientists can agree, it makes sense that there are deep cultural divides in our current system! And generally, the theme is about different people cooperating and maintaining a “base civility”, common ground and humanity.

Each feature is as follows:

• We were assigned to include five different textures/shading techniques and three mediums
• Each hand contains a different texture technique – starting from the red hand, and moving clockwise: 
  • The red hand is cross-hatching
  • The orange hand is stippling, using circles
  • The yellow hand is cross-contour
  • The green hand is invented texture
  • The blue hand is negative space, and
  • The purple hand is gradient
• In each of the sections there are two images devoted to three of the fundamental fields of study (in my opinion):
  • Two mathematical theoretical images
  • two macro cosmos images &
  • two micro cosmos images
• Starting with what looks like a spaceship, we have the Voyager – one of the farthest spacecraft ever sent away from earth
• Moving clockwise, we have the Golden Record – a message for extraterrestrial life included on Voyager
• Then we have a Daphnia, which is a microorganism
• Then a human neuron
• Then the Mandelbrot set – a famous fractal
• Then a Tesseract (as rendered as a 2D representation of a 4D cube)
• The mediums included are:
  • watercolor
  • gel pen
  • oil pastel
  • sharpie &
  • colored pencil.

I had a lot of fun with it. It was quite a long project – the hardest bit might’ve been the mathematics of drawing the hexagon (which I still got a little bit wrong, but I’m very glad that some people like it! Thank you!)