"Austine: Painting with Rainbows"

However lovely their images, still photographs fail to convey the dynamism of Austine Wood-Comarow's unique work. A typical first-time viewer responds as if mesmerized, curious about how the images change so radically from one color to the next, one image to another.

The artist, who simply goes by the name Austine, accomplishes this using "Polage," a technique of her own invention. She sandwiches clear cellophane between polarized filters, shifting the angle of the resulting transparent material's grain so that light passing through each section's layers breaks into color in a different way. Displayed over a light box containing a rotating disk of polarized film, her "polarized light collages" transform in color--sometimes in shape--through repeated cycles. She literally paints with light, creating a series of scenes that each resemble stained glass.

The inventiveness of Austine's medium and her fondness for natural imagery have attracted the attention of science museums and children's hospitals throughout the world. Her work has been commissioned or collected by Disney's EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, La Cite des Sciences in Paris, France, and the Singapore Science Center, among others.

And, "if you can get beyond the level of 'oh, wow!' there is a lot more to them," she explains. Much of her subject matter references the first picture of the Earth broadcast from space: the one showing a fragile blue marble in a vast field of black. "All that we know, all of our history, all that we have ever created, is in that tiny little glow in the blackness," she says.

The "morphing" of images that occurs when her designs change in form allows her to create a piece, for example, that represents the history of science and technology by shifting from a hot-air balloon to the space shuttle. "My aim," Austine says, "is to create a very serious art form that is thought-provoking, deeply inspiring, and motivating."

by Lynn Goya, Las Vegas Life Magazine, June 1998