Still Life (Vanitas):  Biomass Pyramid 

Black Sharpie Marker on Gesso'd Paper, 12.25"x14.5"

Image Submitted by Jeff Scott. This piece winks. It takes a biomass pyramid - a snapshop of time in an ecological community and links it to the transience of life associated with vanitas style still life paintings. I particularly like the sparseness of my still life, where the numbers tell of the impermanance in the sumptuous arrangements of plant and animal life.

Definition of Biomass Pyramids from Wiki:
Biomass p yramids provide a single snapshot in time of an ecological community.

In an ecosystem there is always a foundation species of plant that directly harvests energy from the sun, for example, grass, by the process of photosynthesis. Next are herbivores (primary consumers) that eat the grass, such as the rabbit. Next are carnivores (secondary consumers) that eat the rabbit, such as a bobcat.

Since each layer of this system relates to the one below it by absorbing a fraction of the energy it consumed, each one can be understood as resting on the one below -- which is called a lower trophic level. Every time there is an exchange of energy between one trophic level and another, there is quite a significant loss due to the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. This means so many units of grass can only support a much smaller number of units of rabbits, who can only support a smaller group of bobcats, who can only support a smaller group of mountain lions.

When energy is transferred to the next trophic level, typically only 10% of it is used to build new biomass, becoming stored energy. The other 90% is used for the organisms life processes or is lost as heat to the environment.  As such, each step will be 10% the size of the previous step (100, 10, 1, 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 etc.).