In the early twentieth century the concept of light was radically redefined. Thomas Young's double-slit experiment showed that light is a essentially wave that could be "chopped up" into a particle and so his experiments were a precursor to the theory of relativity. In March 1905, Einstein posited the idea of light duality, which means that a light wave can be either a wave and/or a particle in its very nature. Building on Max Planck's theory on the nature of energy, which postulates that energy comes in little packets of particles, Einstein proposed the quantization of light and introduced his idea of the photon.

This is essentially what I wanted to portray in my painting. It consists of two elements, hydrogen and xenon (or lithium, the colours got mixed up). And with these two elements I painted their spectrum in dots, a little like Seurat, but in the form of a wave.

The reason why I specify which elements I chose to display is because I used their spectra as the basis for the colours in my painting. So, for hydrogen I used purple, blue and red. For Xenon (or Lithium) I used blue, green, yellow and red. In the painting both elements appear to start in the same place, and this was to show how certain elements share the same colour, but not all the time. Each colour of the element was painted in dots to emphasize the fact that colour and/or light can exist as both a wave and a particle. I chose to stick with simple colours because painting the dots would be easier that way, thus the confusion over which element I'm trying to present.

I decided to use oil paint with close to little paint thinner so that I would be able to make the dots as "sturdy" as possible, so that they wouldn't sort of leak onto other dots-this is was to keep the dots in their positions so that together they looked like a wave rather than a smudge. I painted on canvas.

There is a great deal of empty space in the painting. Except for the black borders and the elements themselves, there is virtually nothing but white canvas. This was to illustrate the fact that without the elements there is no colour.

If the dots that make up the waves are looked at long enough, it almost looks like there is some kind of movement in the wave. Look in the Hydrogen wave, right where the blue and purple meet, take a closer view, then step back, and there is some sense of motion. This reflects the Theory of Relativity's first postulate: "there is not one inertial frame that is at rest." The word "frame" here is almost a double entendre since "frame" can be either the black borders of the painting or the "frame" of a video clip, which catches motion. That sort of thing. Moreover, the movement of the waves are constant and so comply with the Theory of Relativity's second postulate which postulates that the speed of light is constant for any observer. And, as it's seen in the painting, with its motion-like appearance, the speed appears constant as the waves go from one side to the other.

The painting aims to reflect the radical changes in our conception of light, and how such simple concepts are actually more complex than we think to the point that we can't even mentally process the idea. Particle or wave?