“Turn of a Friendly Card”
20×24, oil on canvas
Abbey Ryan, 2023
In 2017, when I turned 60, I commissioned a pair of “legacy” paintings from Abbey Ryan, whose work I have collected for many years. The concepts were to pay homage to my career as a chemistry professor (this painting) and also to my Italian heritage on my father’s side of the family (the companion painting). Abbey is an excellent painter whose style evokes the Dutch Masters, and whose work could easily be mistaken for paintings from straight out of that era. These are the largest and most complex compositions she has attempted to date (and knocked them straight out of the park). Nearly all of the objects came from me, and she gets 100% credit for everything else.
This painting is titled “Turn of a Friendly Card.” The title is a direct pull from the themed 1980 record album by The Alan Parsons Project, which features songs that revolve around gambling and the Vegas culture. The titular song contains the lyric “And the game never ends when your whole world depends on the turn of a friendly card.” That line has always impressed me as a broader comment on science, and all of life, as a game of chance whose outcome relies so often on a random good turn that happens in the right place at the right time.
A Medieval aphorism I have used since the mid-1990s in the signature file of my email serves the same purpose: the translation for “Vaille que Vaille Lors Se Verras,” which I saw on an ancient tapestry at the Detroit Institute of Arts, was given as “one goes as one goes, and then one shall see.” I loved this saying, scratched it down when I read it on the wall of the exhibit, and continue to see it as a mantra. My take on it: we just do not know how things turns out until we get there, but we can anticipate and lay as many bets as we can for whatever “just in case” outcome we want. And if the final card comes up in our favor, we are ready for it. We cannot count on any given outcome, but we can hold the door open and potentially get as many supports leaning in our direction in anticipation. No one actually knows the meaning of the original phrase (there are no 15th C dictionaries, after all), but the curator’s translation aligned completely with a fundamental outlook of mine.
A number of years ago, I asked the museum for a high-resolution image of the tapestry (I paid for them to take it out of storage and photograph it), and I had an artist buddy of mine create a line drawing of it, from which another friend in China helped me commission a 48×48 silk embroidery as a copy. Imagining that the saying was originally inscribed on a page of illuminated manuscript, I also designed my idea of what that page looked like and asked the same artist to interpret it. A female figure representing science emerges from the tree of knowledge. She is under attack by the enemies of science, and she reaches for the sword of wisdom to engage the battle against ignorance. The tree is under the banner of Francis Bacon (“And thus knowledge itself is power”) and she is wrapped in Occam’s Razor. All manner of symbolic beasts and objects representing wisdom, inquiry, curiosity, and so on, surround the figure and help fend off the attackers. A hand-colored print of the original art hangs on the wall in this painting.
The chemistry glassware is easy to understand. The old chemistry textbooks are piled on a workspace, and a laboratory notebook is open in the foreground. The books are from my collection, and the notebook is one used by my late colleague and mentor, Seyhan Ege. The glasses are mine (well, an unused pair with an old prescription). The letters are a hand-written correspondence between me and Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Laureate from Cornell who also indulges in diverse interests and their connections to science. Roald contacted me once about working together on an essay, and these are those letters exchanged between us as we developed it – a remark on collaboration.
The pipe is not mine, although I requested it. The commentary by Magritte on his famous painting “La Trahison des Images” (The Treachery of Images, 1929) is the inscription under a well-executed pipe that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). This comment on the fundamental semiotics of chemistry is apt. As chemists, we deal in an array of representations for molecules, teach them to the next generation, and we often get carried away with the symbols (this atom here, this bond there). But no matter what we draw, from “H2O” to a beautifully rendered cholesterol, it is also true that ceci n’est pas une molécule, either.
The matches are Abbey’s, and they have appeared in a number of her paintings.
I have collaborated on work in education in China since the early 2000s, and the cloisonné teacup references those many cups of tea over conversations in universities around China.
The pens are special. In the late 1960s, Parker made this ballpoint/fountain pen pair in a casing of cross-hatched Sterling Silver with a gold nib on the fountain pen. My best friend from my first year of college owned this set and gave them to me because “if I was going to be a professor, then I needed to be able to write with proper style.” Decades later, when we all had an internet, I was motivated to try and track him down, and to my chagrin found out that he had been a victim of HIV/AIDS in the early 1990s. It was inevitable to include these in the composition.
The medal is the inscribed commemorative you receive when awarded the Arthur Thurnau professorship at the University of Michigan, which 3-5 individuals per year get in recognition of their contributions to undergraduate education.
The stack of magazines are copies of the late 19th C magazine of political editorial humor and satire titled Puck. It was the first magazine to use full color lithography printing, and I am a huge fan of many of the pen-line cartoonists from this era. The legend on the masthead reads “What Fools these Mortals Be” along with a naked and cherubic characterization of Shakespeare’s Puck. I’ve been commissioned to do illustrations that ended up published, over the years, and I usually do these in the style of my favorite Puck artist, Frederick Opper. And my first 10 professional publications, as an undergraduate, was a series of satirical cartoons in the Journal of Chemical Education, a series titled “Animated Alchemy.” Anyone paying attention ought to have seen then that I was going to be trouble with a capital T.
Finally, sitting atop the Pucks is a set of playing cards from the mid 1800s, more or less the starting era of modern organic chemistry.
And the game never ends when your whole world depends on the turn of a friendly card.