Leonardo's hair, 06th of November, 2009.

This is another image inspired by Leonardo's works, and I called it Leonardo's hair. Fragile, filamentous (imagined) plants, perhaps some relatives of sea anemones, look as if swinging in a slight sea current. Sandy bottom, but the depth is not large, which can be guessed by the traces of light (caustics) at the bottom and the color. The light suggests underwaterness, the reason for that is that the objects closer to the observer are significantly lighter, and the farther ones are darker which is a consequence of scattering and absorption of light in water. A shift towards blue is partially due to the absorption of light in the medium, and partially from the ambiental influence of the sky (not to be seen directly, but it brings the color to the scene). A lack of strong shadows suggests that all the objects are indirectly lit, more or less the same from all sides (due to scattering). Again a lot of physics and optics, which is not important in the end as the image itself. If it is worth something...

I also got the opportunity to use the model of codium bursa alga which was prepared for the scene of sea cave but not used until now. The color is perhaps shifted towards blue (cyan) a bit more than it should be the case in "reality". But where does the name of the image come from, why Leonardo's hair?.

The inspiration came again from da Vinci's workds, and I first noted Leonardo's sketch (above) of the plant whose latin name is Ornithogalum umbellatum, but the plant is known by its "common" name as the star of Bethlehem. Leonardo in his sketch gives to the thin, filamentous leaves of the plant, an additional movement, some kind of whirling that seems to be stylized on purpose, although it does not take much from the reality of depiction. The pattern that Leonardo suggests in this plant is similar to the whirls in the turbulent flow of water that he sketched many times and studied in different circumstances (image below).

As I said, not only sketched, but one could also say studied, because Leonardo does study how the flow and whirling of water change upon inserting an obstacle (largest side of prism normal or parallel to the flow, see below). And that is what makes Leonardo special - in the studies for his images, his interest are far beyond what is typical for a painter, he wants to know what happens to the objects and phenomena that he paints, in different circumstances, he doesn't care about fixed, prototypical representation of the turbulent motion of water, he wants to know how it depends on the arrangement of rocks that obstruct the flow. And that's why Leonardo is a scientist. But also a carefull and good painter, of course.

Anyhow, Leonardo sees filamentous water jets in other places also, and even in its own hair. In his (alleged, but I would say very probable) autoportrait (image below), one can see how he stylizes his own beard and hair, again quite similar to the turbulent phenomena and leaves of Ornithogalum umbellatum-a.

That's why the image is called Leonardo's hair.

UPDATE: (12th of June, 2014) I am just reading "Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks" by Oxford World's Classics, edition from 2008. Leonardo explicitly compares water and hair. Here's what he said:

Last updated on 12th of June 2014.