Psychology Today
Picture credit: C&EN – American Chemical Society
Tyler Thrasher merges science and art by growing crystals on cicadas, bones, and synthetic opals, turning death and decay into vivid creations. Inspired by nature, color, and transformation, his work challenges how we perceive beauty, mortality, and reality. Through chemistry and creativity, he shows how even the seemingly lifeless can tell extraordinary stories.
Author: Devon Frye
Artist Tyler Thrasher leverages crystals, cicadas, and color to push the boundaries of what’s possible in art and nature.
For as long as Tyler Thrasher can remember—back to playing in his childhood garden and drawing the plants he saw—art and science have been intimately and inextricably intertwined. A chemist and self-described “mad botanist” with a love of old-fashioned alchemy, Thrasher’s artistic and scientific creations—from crystallized skulls to opalized flowers, and from glow-in-the-dark plants to never-before-hybridized succulents—celebrate his love for nature, especially the colors that can (and can’t) be found there. In his artwork and his recent book, The Universe in 100 Colors, he encourages us to explore the colorful world around us and question our beliefs about perception, beauty, and perhaps even reality itself.
Much of your art involves growing crystals on dead things. How did that start? The journey to crystallizing things started with me just drawing a bunch of cicadas. Then I started drawing crystals on the cicadas, which was a fun challenge—crystals are very hard to illustrate—but it did make a cool little visual. Soon, I ended up in a rock and mineral shop in Missouri that had a whole table of lab-grown crystals. I already knew chemistry, but I didn’t know you could do that. I looked at my drawings and thought, Could I actually make these? So I went to Home Depot, bought some chemicals, put a cicada in the solution, crystallized it—and it was immediately the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
Why cicadas? To me, cicadas perfectly embody the process of alchemy and raw early science. They’re underground for most of their lives. When they finally come up, they hatch open into this wonderful creature that only lives for 10 or 11 days. The bulk of their work is unseen. It’s muddy; it’s raw. They emerge from it with something refined to show the world—though that moment is much shorter than the cumulative time it took them to make it. If you look at the medieval alchemists—old dudes out in the woods in their huts, trying to make gold or porcelain—they spent years just trying. A lot of them killed themselves just trying things. Alchemy was dirty work; it was ugly. Most of the things they would pull from the furnace were just scraps or muck or char. But maybe—maybe—one of them would pull out a refined metal or a crystal, or something else visually stunning. Cicadas have that same narrative—one of transmutation, of transformation.
Today, you crystallize things like skulls, bones, and mummified chameleons for your art. How do you characterize your relationship with death? I grew up in a very religious, paranoid sort of household: My father would tell me there were demons everywhere, that Satan was always around the corner. That filled me with fear as a kid—but at the same time, I spent my entire childhood believing that when I die, I will see my loved ones again. That was my comfort, my contingency plan. But in my early 20s—after I went to church one final time, in a last-ditch effort to try to believe in something—it dawned on me that that likely won’t happen. That’s a scary thought when it’s new to you, and it consumed me. I would lie awake at night, shaking in my bed, thinking about how my girlfriend (now my wife) could die in a car wreck tomorrow, and that would be it—all done, close the book. I finally started learning that life isn’t here to comfort us; it’s just here.
Did bringing death into your art help you cope with that? Before I started crystallizing insects, you would not have caught me handling a dead bug. I didn’t have a fascination with bones at all; I thought they were pretty gross, in fact. But working with bugs and bones and finding that something can be beautiful and tell a story beyond its life brought me some comfort—that maybe there was a form of resurrection, but it was in taking an existence and using it to tell a story. Most people think dead bugs are gross, but I’ve found that when you cover them with crystals, it changes how we interact with them. So I felt like I was collaborating with a post-life existence.
You also grow synthetic opals, minerals known for their iridescence. What has that project taught you? I didn’t understand anything about color until I made an opal. I mean, I knew the gist—that materials absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others—but that doesn’t mean much until you see it in practice. The first time I grew an opal, I shone a light on it and thought, Oh my god, this is how color works. There were tiny spheres in the opal that broke up the light into all its different wavelengths. When I rotated the light, all I was doing was changing the direction in which the wavelengths were being broken up—the colors were changing, but the object wasn’t. Seeing that made everything about color make sense to me, all in about five seconds.
This newfound fascination led you to co-author, with writer Terry Mudge, The Universe in 100 Colors. Did you discover any big misconceptions we hold about color? People are really curious about the psychology of color, and many believe that certain colors evoke certain moods across the board—that blues calm everyone down, or that reds make people more energized. I think they’re often disappointed when I tell them that there’s very little science to back that up. It’s subjective to the individual, to different cultures; there isn’t the universal psychological response to colors that I think some people want.
In 2014, scientists unveiled Vanta-black—at the time, the blackest black ever made—then exclusively licensed it to one artist, angering many others. Shouldn’t new colors be made universally available? There’s a lot of anger in the arts community about “liberating” colors, but I think there’s some ignorance in that. Often, we think of a color as, like, a specific shade of blue. But when a company trademarks a color or puts it behind a paywall, the shade is not usually what’s being protected; what’s being protected is the material, the process. Say a chemist is working on a new antivenom—but in the process, they end up making the brightest yellow pigment possible. If they then sell that pigment to a paint company, what’s being protected are the chemicals, the molecules, the process to make that yellow. So yes, I think color should be accessible to everyone. But if you really want one specific shade of blue, and no one’s willing to give it to you, you gotta do what the average alchemist did, ideally safely: Figure out how to make it yourself.
Classical painters crushed lead to get the perfect shade of white, often poisoning themselves in the process; ancient Romans harvested thousands of sea snails to make each gram of the purple dye reserved only for the emperor’s use. Why do humans go to such illogical lengths in their pursuit of color? The universe, existence itself—it’s all so weird. It’s weird that we exist; it’s weird that anything else exists for us to observe. But we have senses that allow us to discern what humans perceive as reality, and color is one of those windows through which we can observe reality. So I think we use color to better understand ourselves, to better understand the world around us. I don’t think we have a choice in that; we’re drawn to it because we have this thing called consciousness that wants to better understand itself and what it’s observing. Color helps solidify our place in that.
In a recent study, researchers stimulated certain receptors in participants’ eyes, allowing them to experience a never-before-seen color. What do you think it means to discover these so-called impossible colors? I think it’s important for us to have our reality challenged, both for our critical thinking and for our understanding that things are not what we think they are. I would love it if every single human could’ve experienced that new color at once. I think it would freak us all out, but it would also make us question: What else is out there that we just can’t perceive? Impossible colors, imaginary colors—they poke at the façade that we have everything figured out or that things are as they appear.
Credits: TCA, LLC.