Radiation physicist Arie van’t Riet creates gorgeous colorized x-ray paintings of nature scenes that have a serene etherealness about them.
It all started when a colleague asked him to take an x-ray of one of his paintings, and that got him thinking about other kinds of objects he could x-ray. His first test subject was a bouquet of tulips. Its analog image, or silver bromide x-ray film, resembled a black and white negative which he digitized and inverted, then selectively colored in Photoshop.
van’t Riet worked on insects, lizards, turtles, cats, and monkeys next, composing natural scenes from them which he calls “bioramas”. According to his website, “I prefer (to) X-ray objects of ordinary scenes like a butterfly nearby a flower, a fish in the ocean, a mouse in the field, a heron along the riverside, a bird in a tree and so on. Each time it is challenging me to arrive at an X-ray photograph that represents the sentiment of the scene, to raise questions and excite curiosity. I hope, in most of the images presented here, I succeeded.”
[via My Modern Met, Lustik, NYBG and TEDx, images via Arie van’t Riet]