There is no such thing as a time machine that can take you to the past or future, but there is a space machine that can shrink you to a thousandth of your present size and deposit you in worlds just as strange.
Artist Robert Koutny of Lombard does it all the time, and the pictures he takes on these trips can stop viewers in their tracks.
”There is a magic moment in people`s minds when they realize, first, that the artwork is of something real and, second, that is it something very small,” Koutny said.
”Another frequent response I get at art galleries and craft shows is `I like your artwork, but I have nowhere to put it. Couldn`t you do something in beige to match my living room?` But I don`t want to match their living rooms. I want them to match their living rooms to my artwork.”
If that is the case, then collectors of Koutny`s work will be living amid brilliant bursts of red, blue, yellow and pink in a surreal landscape.
Using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) in Northern Illinois University`s physics lab in De Kalb, artist-photographer Koutny (pronounced COAT-knee) transports viewers of his microphotographs to a world where they are less than a millimeter tall and lets them rub shoulders with microscopic plants and animals.
Some of the flora and fauna that inhabit his ”microscapes” have to be magnified 500 to 1,000 times just to be visible.
Ann Ayres, director of the Neville-Sargent Gallery in Chicago, said Koutny`s work ”shows a good sense of color and impeccable technique.” Jeff Curto, a photography instructor at College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn, described Koutny`s work as ”startlingly beautiful, at times terrifying and showing a great sense of composition.”
A portfolio of his microscapes has been published recently in Review of the Arts magazine, based in Portland, Me., and his work was also used to illustrate the calendar of the Entomological Society of America, affiliated with the University of Maryland.
Koutny has shown his work in a number of galleries in and around Du Page County. He has had a one-man show at Kroch`s & Brentano`s Wabash Avenue store in downtown Chicago and has sold his work to several corporations through the Neville-Sargent Art Gallery. This year he will be exhibiting at numerous arts and crafts shows throughout the area.
The first time Rosalie Koutny saw her son`s photographs, she informed him (Koutny said for the first time) that she also had worked on a SEM while analyzing new petroleum products for General Motors in Chicago in the early 1950s. Not only that, Rosalie Koutny still has a copy of an old GM company newsletter that identifies her as the first woman to ever use a scanning electron microscope.
”Free electrons may actually be in my blood,” Koutny said. ”Before I was born my mother was exposed to high voltages and low radiation materials at GM. There was a joke in our family that whenever my mother passed a TV set, it would begin to glow.”
Whether it was destiny or sheer coincidence that connected Koutny and the microscope, the artist can clearly identify his mission: to forcefully show people that there is more than one reality.
”I want my art to transport the viewer to a different dimension,”
Koutny said, ”to immerse him in a sea which is in reality only a drop of water.
”Space exploration has expanded man`s perspectives about himself, the universe and his place in it. As an artist, I`m trying to do the same thing. I`m just going in the other direction.”
Koutny describes traveling in the microscopic world as ”more exciting than actually taking the microphotographs. It`s like taking a photographic excursion to the Grand Canyon or a tropical rain forest.
”It`s really incredible seeing new worlds for the first time. Scanning over the surface of leaves, I feel as if I`m flying over some strange planet overgrown with unusual vegetation.
”I can go in any direction, zoom in for a closer inspection or zoom out for an overview. I find that similar shapes and patterns repeat themselves throughout every scale of existence.”
Considering the other-worldly environment that Koutny explores using the SEM, it isn`t much of a surprise to learn that the long-haired, bearded artist believes in and practices astral projection, also called out of body experiences, a la actress Shirley MacLaine. Since he was 19, Koutny said, he has had one or two such experiences a month.
”Astral projection is a process of waking up in your dream and saying,
`I am awake in my dream and I can will myself to wherever I want to go,`
” he said.
When he`s really awake and not exploring microscopic worlds, Koutny works full-time as an illustrator of instruction manuals for a manufacturing company in Elmhurst.
His Lombard home (”a communal-type arrangement in the spirit of the late `60s,” Koutny said) is shared with two dogs, two cats and four other adults, including Steve Wilson, owner of the house, and Wilson`s sister, Katherine, Koutny`s inamorata and writer of poetry.
”I`m a dreamer, a romantic and a procrastinator,” Koutny said of himself. ”I`m 30 years old and I`ve never quite gotten around to voting.”
Koutny first encountered photographs made from the 5-by-7-inch video screen of an electron microscope in 1979 while on a science trip to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
”At that time I was looking for subject matter that was surreal and out of the ordinary. Suddenly I was looking at shapes that look familiar but other-worldly,” Koutny said.
Shortly thereafter, Koutny mentioned his newfound interest in electron microscopes to Ben Mahmoud, a painting teacher at NIU. Mahmoud not only encouraged Koutny to use microscopic subject matter but also arranged for Koutny to use the $225,000 SEM in the university`s physics lab.
From 1979 to 1981, Koutny made only black and white microphotographs. In 1983, he began making color prints of the photographs, which required some artistic improvisation since the SEM`s small video screen displays only a black and white image.
Using 35 mm. color slide film, Koutny took pictures of his 1/2-by-11-inch black and white prints. He then drove down to Palm Beach, Fla., to visit the technicians at the LaserColor Co., a high-tech custom photo lab, and discussed with the technicians the colors and effects he was looking for. After making two such trips, Koutny now simply phones in the specifications for his latest works.
”All you need is the SEM and an infinite supply of gold dust,” Koutny said. Gold dust, he explained, is frequently sprinkled onto microspecimens before they are placed in the vacuum chamber of the SEM because it greatly improves the reflectivity of the specimen and results in an image on the SEM`s video screen that has a three-dimensional look and greater contrast.
Three years ago, partly because some gallery directors regarded his work as scientific photography and not necessarily art, Koutny began using the photographs as starting points for large, combination air brush and pastel paintings, including some 5-by-8-foot murals.
One of the most arresting of Koutny`s microscopic images is the head of an ambush bug, a microscopic bug (Phymata borsa) that roughly resembles a grasshopper.
Then there is the one that at first glance looks like the sea of holes in the Beatles movie ”Yellow Submarine.” The scene is in fact a picture of water droplets on parts of a flower of an hour plant (Hibiscus trionum), magnified 150 times.
His microstudies of plants have included leaves of wild bergamot and common mullion as well as seed pods of bladder campion.
For now, Koutny is intent on keeping the micro images in his life. And true to his wish to have people decorate their homes around his work, Koutny`s bedroom boasts his latest work in progress, leading to a final question: What kind of bedspread and drapes does one pair with an 8-foot high, multi-hued head of a magnified ambush bug?
