Tag: science and art

Conserving Rita Letendre’s famous artworks

Conserving Rita Letendre’s famous artworks

Research undertaken at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan was key to understanding how to conserve experimental oil paintings by Rita Letendre, one of Canada’s most respected living abstract artists.

The work done at the CLS was part of a collaborative research project between the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) that came out of a recent retrospective Rita Letendre: Fire & Light at the AGO. During close examination, Meaghan Monaghan, paintings conservator from the Michael and Sonja Koerner Centre for Conservation, observed that several of Letendre’s oil paintings from the fifties and sixties had suffered significant degradation, most prominently, uneven gloss and patchiness, snowy crystalline structures coating the surface known as efflorescence, and cracking and lifting of the paint in several areas.

Read more on the Canadian Light Source website

Image: Rita Letendre. Victoire [Victory], 1961. Oil on canvas, Overall: 202.6 × 268 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of Jessie and Percy Waxer, 1974, donated by the Ontario Heritage Foundation, 1988. © Rita Letendre L74.8.

Talented photographers capture the art of science

Talented photographers capture the art of science

See the winning photos from Brookhaven Lab’s Photowalk

On Wednesday, May 16, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory hosted 30 amateur and professional photographers for a behind-the-scenes “Photowalk” of the Lab. The photographers were able to explore and photograph major experimental facilities that are not usually accessible to the public, including the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—the only operating particle collider in the U.S.—and the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—one of the world’s most advanced synchrotron light sources. Both are DOE Office of Science User Facilities.

Experiments at RHIC and NSLS-II explore the leading edge of fundamental and applied science. At RHIC, physicists collide gold ions, at nearly the speed of light, to recreate the same matter that filled the universe a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. At NSLS-II, scientists use ultra-bright x-ray light to reveal the chemical makeup of proteins, batteries, superconducting materials, and everything in between. The “Photowalkers” lent their talents to capturing the remarkable design of these experiments, showcasing the facilities in all their scientific glory.

>Read more on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II website

Picture: (extract) Finalist picture”X-Ray Eye”. Captured at NSLS-II’s Soft Inelastic Scattering (SIX) beamline.
Credit: Steve Lacker