Blame God

image from here

Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t have a client when he painted the Mona Lisa. And here’s how I know. It’s the most beautiful man-made creation without being perfect. The horizon behind Mona Lisa is not even level. Surely, a client, out to prove she’s not in the production meetings for the free donuts would have noticed.

“I like the general flow so far, Leo, but can we do something about the horizon?” I guess that one comment would be fine. Problem is these geniuses do not stop at that.

“I think it would be better if she didn’t have too large a forehead. Can we somehow deflect the focus from that?”

And some other genius, not to be outdone, “Ah yes, and she looks pale. Is she sick?”

At the end of 200 such production meetings, the most famous painting of Leonardo would have ended with a Hitler mustache. No kidding, it is a strong confident statement, some cubicle-jock daring to be known as a risk-taker would insist.

Once, a long-time client asked me to create a screensaver for her company. It was to be of the outer space and solar-system theme. Fine. Fine.

It took me about a day to get an artistic rendition of the sun. It was not just a yellow circle, trust me. That would have taken me 3 seconds flat. I spent a day just for the glorious sun – the centerpiece of my work.

Once I got the sun going, I meticulously began rendering the planets. I carefully straddled the line between artistic and realistic. Mercury would have disappeared and the Earth reduced to a dot if drawn to scale with the sun in the same frame on a computer screen. My compromise, I scaled the planets relative to each other and dragged the sun to the left of the screen, pushing about a third off-screen.

As to distances between planets, again I had to reduce the scaling to fit everything into one screen. Outer-space is mostly empty space. That certainly won’t look pretty.

And finally the planetary movements, once again I employed more or less the same solution but now with respect to time. It takes Mercury 88 days to revolve around the sun, the earth 365 ¼ days. I got Mercury revolving my sun once every half second and used that as my base to scale down all other planets’ revolutions.

One final touch, the coup de grace to my perfect universe, I saluted the great work of Johannes Kepler and had my planets sweeping equal areas in equal time intervals.

“Hmmm… I like the sun but why are the planets colored that way?” The long-time client asked in the meeting.

“Ah ma’am, I am sorry but the planets are actually colored that way,” I responded.

Did I expect the client to notice the subtle goodies I had incorporated in my work? That I had them moving to scale in the Keplerian way? No. I’ve never had such clients. But color? Is that all she can see? And I had all my planets colored the right way.

I proposed to give them a brighter hue, so they won’t look so “dull”. But no, Venus will stay blue, Mars red. She was happy with my Saturn, Jupiter and Earth, but why is Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto look so uninteresting?

I must’ve looked visibly pissed as I kept pressing the point that my colors were right. That all I can do is to increase contrast and brighten the hue.

“I saw on the internet, the planets look so much more colorful.”

Ah yes, the internet! Of course I have to concede the point against the almighty internet.

“Email me those pictures and I will use them as my guide to recolor the planets.”

A day later, my inbox had a ton of pictures. Clearly the client wanted to prove that she was right, and more importantly, that I was wrong.

I responded with an email of my own.

“Those are thermal scans and infrared pictures. People do not use CT scans of their heads for photo IDs. Do not blame me for the color of the planets. I did not choose the colors, blame God.”