The Village Green is profiling the SOMA artists who were awarded 2025 Annual Grants from NJ Council on the Arts.
Ivan Amato has had a long and interesting career that has always included science in some way. He was raised in South Orange, graduated Columbia High School, graduated Rutgers with a chemistry degree, and eventually moved to the Washington DC area for work.
He has written science articles, published books on science, worked with DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and in public relations and public information in various science fields in Washington DC and the Northeast.
Ivan Amato, crystal micrography artist.
Now Amato has recently moved back home to South Orange where brings all of this background into his art, crystal photomicrography. In the simplest of terms, using a microscope to take photos of crystals. Where science and art intersect.
Amato didn’t start out doing crystal photomicrography. He started by photographing buds on plants at the Brookdale Garden in Maryland where he lived. “It was almost a pilgrimage. I would go out there and do this kind of portraiture of buds coming out. Just the idea that you could get really close and see things that you normally don’t.”
Amato: “A mixture of alanine and glutamine with a pinch of glycine, which are three of the 20 amino-acid building blocks that build into proteins, recrystallized from a solution in Vodka onto a glass microscope slide. Here’s a sesame-seed-sized patch of the slide. Made me stare like I should get a slap across my face. And that’s just one of the gorgeous views this slide had to offer.”
But it was the pandemic that allowed Amato to do a reset and to give himself permission to buy a microscope and to remember a long forgotten inspiration of an image of crystallized vitamin C from the USDA.
After a bit of a learning curve, Amato has honed his art and the interesting ways to get different results from the same substance.
Amato explains, “As a practitioner of crystal photomicrography, I coerce substances to crystallize on microscope slides, view them with light and optical filters, and photograph them. Everything matters in each crystallization: the purity of the chemicals, the temperature, the rate of solidification, the tiny tilts of the slide during solidification, the dust particles or fibers that alight onto the slide, the humidity in the air. As a result, a crystallization of even the very same substance from the very same solution will never unfold exactly the same way on two different slides.”
Amato: “Another eye-catcher from my ‘Ascorbic on Time’ series. Vitamin C, ascorbic acid, C6H8O6, can crystallize into a wondrous diversity of forms. Here’s one embodiment, which, because I had forgotten about the glass slide I grew these on, had evolved over time, in this case with a nice 3D effect. The scene here would just about fit inside this O.”
He continues, “To my delight, as I tour each stick-of-gum-sized slide under my microscope, it feels like I’m traveling through a minuscule national park with astonishing views of natural formations. Regardless of the size of my work hanging on a wall, the microscape it depicts probably could fit on the underbelly of a ladybug.”
But what is the most essential thing to him about all of this?
Patterns.
Amato explains, “You’re looking for patterns. It couldn’t be more apropos of a word here because patterns are what crystals are. It is the different configurations of atoms…. And that’s because that pattern is kind of seated all the way down to the traits of their atoms.”
This was the first time Amato applied for the grant. He knew what he was doing was very unusual and decided to apply. He
“An image from a recrystallization of de-icing road salt. The brand of rock salt I tapped into combines several salts: sodium chloride, calcium chloride and magnesium chloride. They resolidified into an engaging variety of forms. Each element of the image shown here is comparable in size to a bit of fly anatomy, say, an eye or a knee joint.”
then promptly forgot about it until he received the email. Initially, he thought it was a rejection, but he went on to read the words, “We’re delighted to inform you….” He sat there with a stupid smile and thought to himself, the money is great but what is better is that it’s a celebration of the artist and acknowledging the role of art in our lives.
It encourages him to keep diving into what he’s doing and to “try to find more ways to share it with people.”
While the $13,000 award has some restrictions, no equipment purchases over $350 and a very low reporting requirement, it will allow Amato to purchase supplies, from glass slides, various chemicals to create crystals, lighting sources, and for printing of the images.
