After my opening at the Soprafina Gallery in Boston several years ago, friends invited me to dinner with their friends—an oncologist and his wife. Over the meal he told me about his research. He had access to mountains of data collected from patients over many years, and he and his team were struggling to mine the information for patterns that might predict cancer.

When I start a canvas I’m not really mixing paint; I’m tuning a field of tiny radio stations that happen to live in the visible band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Red light hums along at roughly 620–750 nanometers—about 400 terahertz in frequency—while violet screams past at closer to 380 nanometers, almost 790 terahertz . Knowing that lets me steer feeling with a bit more intention.