Globule Marbled Moon Print
The Physics of a Drop That Will Not Sink
Drop ordinary ink into a glass of water and it billows downward, spreads, and disappears into solution within seconds. Drop marbling colour onto the surface of a prepared size bath and something different happens: the colour refuses to sink or dissolve. It spreads outward across the surface as a thin, floating skin, pushed by tiny differences in surface tension between the paint, its carrier, and the liquid beneath, an effect related to the same physics that makes a drop of washing-up liquid chase itself across a bowl of water, pushing weaker areas of surface tension outward ahead of it. Marblers add a wetting agent, traditionally ox gall, to the paint specifically to control how far and how evenly each drop spreads before it is touched by a comb or stylus, and every globule in this piece is a small, frozen record of that spreading, caught and lifted before it could spread any further or merge into its neighbours.
Globules of a different kind cover the moon's own surface, left there by the same basic event repeated for over four billion years: impact. A crater is essentially a splash, a globule in solid rock rather than liquid paint, formed in seconds when an incoming body strikes the surface at speeds of several kilometres a second, vaporising on impact and throwing a ring of shattered, molten and pulverised rock outward and upward before it falls back as a raised rim and a blanket of ejecta. The moon's brightest, most obviously young craters, Tycho chief among them, still show pale rays of ejected material streaking out across the surface for hundreds of kilometres, rays that have not yet been dulled by the slow darkening effect of billions of years of micrometeorite bombardment and solar wind, called space weathering. Without an atmosphere or water to erode them, and without plate tectonics to recycle the crust, the moon keeps its impact scars far longer than Earth does; nearly all of Earth's own equivalent craters have long since eroded away or been swallowed by moving continents.
This piece is printed on 100% cotton rag paper, one of a limited edition of ten individually floated and lifted prints, no two of which repeat their pattern exactly. It is mounted on a high quality round window-cut mount board, available with a choice of mount colours, and backed with an acid-free card board for long-term stability. No frame is included, leaving that choice to the buyer, along with the glazing; UV-filtering glass is a sensible precaution against fading from direct sun over years.
A pattern built from rounded, cellular globules has a texture that plain photography of the moon does not, and it suits a wall where it will be seen at a slight angle as often as head-on, since the raised, pooled texture of marbled ink catches light differently from different positions in a room.
This is a limited edition of ten, made in a single size of 40cm x 40cm (400mm x 400mm), priced at £60, mounted on round window-cut board.
Globule Marbled Moon Print — 40cm x 40cm, marbled print on cotton rag paper, mounted on round window-cut board. View the piece