Arie van’t Riet – Colorized X-ray Images of Nature
Arie van’t Riet is a Dutch radiation physicist. He studied at Delft University of Technology and obtained his PhD from Utrecht University. Arie never thought he would be an artist. One day a colleague asked him to X-ray a painting. When that worked out fine, he saw a world of possibilities for X-ray imaging outside the hospital. He began to X-ray all sorts of atypical subjects seduced by the challenge of recreating natural scenes. He went on to X-ray insects and then complete natural scenes that included animals like cats, turtles, monkeys and lizards. The analog image or the silver bromide X-ray film looks like a black and white negative. He then inverts and selectively colorizes in Photoshop. Riet calls these stunning works “bioramas.” Showing the hidden complexity of the natural world, every X-ray photograph represents the sentiment of the scene.
