Candies pressed into service to capture cosmos

A symphony in pinks and reds, deep blues and purples, artist Martha Benzing's studio looks like a sweetshop.

Stacked along its walls, there are giant sacks of M&Ms, Mars Bars, Starbursts, Kool-Aid and Galaxies. On a long work table, in opaque Tupperware bowls, heaps of individual colors sit dissolving in water. They are yielding pigments Benzing will apply to silks with an airbrush. As the fabric lies there, wet and shimmering, she presses whole M&Ms into its surface. Each leaves an imprint, eerily faint and white.

But this North Carolina resident is not making pop art. What animates her work is a vision of outer space, a view now available on the Internet from the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble, says Benzing, has changed her world view as well as her art. "As far back as '97, I had started `painting' with candy. Then the pieces I was working on seemed to get a lot darker. I thought, `Hmmm, these look sort of like outer space.' "

It was last summer, when "fooling around on the Internet," she saw a string of scientific Web sites featuring Hubble images. In the midst of preparations for a New York gallery show, Benzing found herself derailed by the photographs - and the information.

She set about trying to understand both. "It became obsessive, because it's just so overwhelming. What I started doing is: I'd get a feeling for one image, then I'd just go off and paint. Afterward, I might add or subtract, to make it more like `reality.' "

Benzing's new works debuted two weeks ago in Seattle. They have been billed merely as "New Paintings." She was afraid to list individual Hubble references; instead, the title cards for each read: "From the series Portrait of Stars." At the opening, however, viewers were clear about what they saw; the opening echoed with words like "cosmic," "starscape" - and "Hubble."

But the viewer whose opinion mattered most to Benzing showed up quietly on a Saturday afternoon. Professor Bruce Balick is an astronomer at the University of Washington - and he knows the Hubble Space Telescope well. In fact, Balick took many of those pictures Benzing scrutinized.

The scientist always hoped that an artist would choose to interpret these; he once even mailed a special plea to Dale Chihuly. ("I thought, `Here's a master of light, color and three-dimensional form. He's gotta be interested!' But he never even replied.")

Balick arrived at Benzing's show with clearly curious eyes. Minutes passed while he took a stroll among the paintings. Finally, he stopped to make an observation. "As someone who studies these things for a living, it's easy for me to feel I have the same kind of dreams I see here."

He then turned toward the largest canvas, a skyscape made from Kool-Aid, cold wax and candy. To Balick, it did not appear a zany artifact. Instead, he said, "I'm looking at the clouds where gas and dust collapse to form stars . . . these are very dark and dusty regions. Of course, I'm speaking of cosmic dust. Every carbon atom in our body, every atom of oxygen, got here in the form of that dust or as water.

"So there's a very visceral relationship between us and the cosmos."

Stepping back, Balick tried a different view of the radiant canvas. "Here, we see the young stars forming, the young M&Ms are emerging!"

Benzing's smallest picture is a perfect square, layered and layered with exotic pigments and M&M "stars." Peering at it, Balick turns to all the gallery's other visitors. "Has anyone here seen Hubble deep field photography?" There is a chorus of subdued but interested no's. Balick takes a breath and draws his hands together. "When you're limited, using only a telescope on the ground, you can never shoot more than a 12- to 14-hour exposure. After that, it's daylight. But where the Hubble is, there isn't any daylight."

He leans into his listeners. "So the Hubble took a 10-day exposure, aimed at the very darkest part of the sky. At the darkest void we currently know to exist. It was an adventure, done to see just what could be found."

Balick gestures at the image on the wall. "That 10-day picture actually looked - just like this! Right to the bottom of it, there were galaxies, red ones and blue ones. It was very, very crowded."

His eyes bore into the painting. "There was such a feeling of distance in that image! Some of the light in it was emitted 10 billion years ago; the brightest stars it showed were 10 billion light years away. When that light was emitted, the universe was one-third its present age."

In his pocket, Balick has an e-mail from Benzing. It reads in part: "I wonder if you will see anything in the paintings. . . . There is one which is obviously Hubble Deep Field. (At least, I am hoping that this is obvious!)"

M&Ms may make strange tools for cosmic contemplation. Yet, for Benzing, they have clearly been successful. Like any paintings, her works are both documents and fixed objects. Yet, like Balick's Hubble shots, she also knows they are only snapshots: moments captured in a universe changing around us.

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On view

Martha Benzing's work is at James Harris Gallery, 309A Third Ave., Seattle, until Feb. 26; 206-903-6220; Tuesday-Saturday, 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; and from Feb. 25 at Caren Golden Fine Art, 526 W. 26th St., New York, NY. Bruce Balick's work may be viewed via www.astro.washington.edu/balick/